Archive of posts tagged: Specialization
From Application Specific to General Purpose (Again)
With Dennard scaling discontinued, application-specific hardware accelerators are ubiquitous in modern computers to offer more efficient task processing. Famous examples include Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Apple’s Neural Engines for...
Hitting an Accelerator Wall: When Specialized Chips Meet the End of Moore’s Law
Background These are exciting and challenging times for computer architects. The looming end of Moore’s law and the breakdown of Dennard scaling force everybody to put on their thinking caps and envision what future processors will look like when transistors...
Why the GPGPU is Less Efficient than the TPU for DNNs
The GPGPU’s massive multithreading is unnecessary for DNNs, and imposes performance, area, and energy overheads. By avoiding such multithreading, the TPU is more efficient.
What’s the future of technology scaling?
It isn’t every day that a major company throws in the towel on Moore’s Law, so it is worth noting the announcement by GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) to halt development of the 7nm process node. With this announcement, there are now only three major vendors —...Subscribe
