Innovating in a Post Moores Law World Mark Horowitz EE & CS, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Innovating in a Post Moore’s Law World

Mark Horowitz EE & CS, Stanford University

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Mark Horowitz

• Yahoo! Professor, Stanford

▶ Electrical Engineering & Computer Science ▶ Ph.D. in EE from Stanford, 1984 ▶ Former EE Chair

• Research: Digital systems design

▶ RISC machines - MIPS-X, TORCH ▶ Distributed Shared Memory – FLASH, SMASH ▶ High-speed IO – Rambus ▶ Security – XOM ▶ Computational Photography – Frankencamera ▶ Extremely Efficient Computing – Darkroom, CE

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IT World is Changing

• Moving from technology to application driven

▶ Success is no longer about access to latest technology ▶ It is about finding the right application to address

• To understand why, we need to look at history

▶ Why are computers so prevalent?

• How to be successful in this new age

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Moore’s Law Made Gates Cheap

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Dennard’s Scaling Made Them Fast & Low Energy

• The triple play:

▶ Get more gates,

1/L2 1/2

▶ Gates get faster,

CV/i 

▶ Energy per switch

CV2 3

Dennard, JSSC, pp. 256‐268, Oct. 1974

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Our Expectation

• Cray-1: world’s fastest computer 1976-1982

▶ 64Mb memory (50ns cycle time) ▶ 40Kb register (6ns cycle time) ▶ ~1 million gates (4/5 input NAND) ▶ 80MHz clock ▶ 115kW

• In 45nm (30 years later)

▶ < 3 mm2 ▶ > 1 GHz ▶ ~ 1 W

CRAY‐1

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Houston, We Have A Problem

http://cpudb.stanford.edu/

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The Power Limit

http://cpudb.stanford.edu/

Watts/mm2

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We Were Greedy

10x too large

http://cpudb.stanford.edu/

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This Problem Is Not Going Away: P = C * Vdd2 * f

http://cpudb.stanford.edu/

L0.6

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Think About It

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Stagnation of Multi-Core Processors

http://cpudb.stanford.edu/

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Technology to the Rescue?

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Problems w/ Replacing CMOS

• Pretty fundamental physics

▶ Avoiding this problem will be hard

• Its capability is pretty amazing

▶ fJ/gate, 10ps delays, 109 working devices

e‐

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Catch - 22

Capital you need Investment Risk Very Different = High Risk Building Computers = Large $

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The Truth About Innovation

• Start by creating new markets

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It is the End of Scaling, Not Silicon

• Silicon will not disappear

▶ It will still be a huge business, but will consolidate ▶ Growth rate is slower, and scaling is slow

• Silicon will become like concrete and steel

▶ Basis of a huge industry, critical to everything ▶ But fairly stable and predictable

• Will remain the dominate substrate for computing

Have A Shiny Ball, Now What?

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Cup Holders

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• Small additions to a complex product

– With large perceived value

CPU Cup Holders Specialized Hardware

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A8

Consumer Cup Holders

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Improved Cup Holders (IoT)

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• Add communication to compute

From Bill Curtis Arm

Our CMOS Future

• Cup holders made for computing devices

▶ Need to optimize energy efficiency for high performance systems ▶ Build specialized hardware for that application

• Cup holders made from computing devices

▶ Capability of today’s technology is incredible ▶ Can add computing and communication for nearly $0 ▶ Key questions are what problems need to be solved?

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What This Means

• Computer performance scaling will slow
• Computing chips for specific markets will appear

▶ And manufacturing the addition secret sauce won’t cost very much

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Computing platforms are stabilizing

The New Challenge:

• Application specific products have smaller markets

▶ Harder to predict what will win; most will fail ▶ Wins on average are smaller

• People who have product ideas

▶ Don’t know about hardware, let alone know how to use it

• People who know about the technology

▶ Are a special subset of the population ▶ May not be in touch with what great products will be

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And System Design Is Hard

• Every look at a modern SoC “datasheet”?

▶ They are 500+ pages, and many types

• And then you have to worry about the OS

▶ And the drivers

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The Problem: Last of Clarke’s Three Laws

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that

something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

• The only way of discovering the limits of the

possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is

indistinguishable from magic.

E40M Fall 2015 Lecture 1

Remember This Trade-off?

Personal cost (time/money) Product Risk

• Need to reduce cost to play

▶ Building constructors, not

instances

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Needed Infrastructure

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• Apps developers need to work in their space

▶ Program input; auto generate the hardware and system software

• Hardware prototypes shipped

▶ Knowledge of fabrication sources ▶ Debugging / bring up support

• Sales channel for finished devices

▶ To encourage more people to spend time creating new apps

Tock Operating System

• Traditionally, embedded systems assume all code

is trusted

►No memory protection ►No privilege levels

• IoT is moving towards an application store model

►Pebble watch ►iWatch

• Need an embedded operating system that

supports running multiple, untrusted applications

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Ravel Framework

• Write a data processing pipeline

►Consists of a set of Models, describing data as it is stored ►Transforms move data between Models ►Instances of Models are bound to devices ►Views can display Models ►Controllers determine how data moves to Transforms

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Key to Success

System needs to appeal to two sets of users

• Application designers who want to use the system

▶ Need the system to be able to handle many details for them

• Expert designers who want to extend the system

▶ Would like it to be “simple” to add new stuff

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Recently Things Are Looking Up

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A New Hope

• If killer products are going to be application driven

▶ Application experts need to design them

• If technology is scaling more slowly

▶ We can incorporate current design knowledge into tools ▶ To create extensible system constructors

• We can leverage the 2nd bullet to enable the 1st

▶ To usher in a new wave of innovative computing products

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