Lighting the dark silicon by exploiting heterogeneity on future processors

As we embrace the deep submicron era, dark silicon caused by the failure of Dennard scaling impedes us from attaining commensurate performance benefit from the increased number of transistors. To alleviate the dark silicon and effectively leverage the advantage of decreased feature size, we consider a set of design paradigms by exploiting heterogeneity in the processor manufacturing. We conduct a thorough investigation on these design patterns from different evaluation perspectives including performance, energy-efficiency, and cost-efficiency. Our observations can provide insightful guidance to the design of future processors in the presence of dark silicon.