Dark Silicon Aware Multicore Systems: Employing Design Automation With Architectural Insight

The emergence of dark silicon-a fundamental design constraint absent in past generations-brings intriguing challenges and opportunities to microprocessor design. In this brief, we demonstrate the challenges of comparing competing design styles across different technology generations in a dark silicon era. We provide a new metric to guide a dark silicon aware (DSA) system design and propose a stochastic optimization algorithm for DSA multicore system design. Our technique shows 11%-58% and 5.7-5.8 times improvement in energy efficiency for forthcoming technology generations with two multicore design styles: cores with various voltage-frequency domains and cores with heterogeneous microarchitectures.