The Path Forward: Specialized Computing in the Datacenter

Popular belief holds that the cores on chip will grow at an exponential rate, following Moore’s Law, with a commensurate increase in performance. However, by exploring the design space of multicore chips across technologies under a large array of design parameters, we observe that physical constraints in power and off-chip bandwidth prohibit such performance increase. This leads us to conclude that server chips will not scale beyond a few tens of cores, potentially leaving the die real-estate underutilized in future technology generations. We observe that heterogeneous multicores can leverage the die area to overcome the initial power barrier, delivering significantly higher performance for the same offchip bandwidth and power envelopes. Thus, specialized computing, especially when coupled with emerging memory technologies, promises significant increases in performance and energy-efficiency compared to general-purpose computing in the datacenter.