SHF: Small: Exploration of energy-optimized computing architectures using integrated voltage regulators

移动的计算设备（诸如蜂窝电话、平板电脑和膝上型计算机）已经成为现代生活的永久固定装置。此外，用户已经习惯于不断改进功能和可用性的技术进步。几十年来，这种技术进步在很大程度上归功于摩尔定律，该定律预测晶体管数量将持续增加一倍，成本将不断降低。几乎同样长的时间里，人们一直在重复现在众所周知的说法，“没有指数永远持续”，也预测了摩尔定律的最终终结。看来，最终可能会接近，这激励研究，确定低效率，并在传统的不同研究领域的交叉点找到机会，以提高从移动的到云中服务器的计算范围的设备的性能和能源效率。该项目建立在控制微处理器电压和频率的现有技术的基础上，但将它们带到更高的集成和粒度水平。有几个关键挑战阻碍了计算的持续增长。无论是由于高性能计算系统中的高冷却成本还是由于移动的设备中的固定能量容量，功率预算的限制都需要创新，这些创新将允许具有更大数量的内核的未来系统动态地适应现代工作负载的时变需求。集成电压调节器提供了解决能量和可扩展性约束的最有前途的方法之一。集成稳压器具有纳秒级电压转换时间、高功率水平下向负载提供更高效电流以及外形尺寸和系统级电源管理方面的显著优势。该项目旨在开发一种系统的方法来回答围绕在未来芯片中嵌入集成稳压器的好处和开销的问题。

Mobile computing devices such as cellular phones, tablets, and laptop computers have become permanent fixtures of modern-day life. Moreover, users have become accustomed to consistent advances in technology that continue to improve features and usability. For decades, such technological improvements could largely be attributed to Moore's Law, which predicts consistent doubling of transistor count and reductions in costs. For almost as long, people have repeated the now well-known saying, "no exponential lasts forever," and also predicted the eventual end of Moore's Law. It appears that the end might finally be near, which motivates research that identifies inefficiencies and finds opportunities at the intersection of traditionally disparate research areas to improve performance and energy efficiency of devices that span the computing spectrum from mobile to servers in the cloud. This project builds on existing technologies that control the voltage and frequency of microprocessors, but takes them to higher levels of integration and granularity.There are several key challenges that stand to obstruct continued growth in computing. Limitations in power budgets, whether due to high cooling costs in high-performance computing systems or to fixed energy capacity in mobile devices, require innovations that will allow future systems with larger numbers of cores to dynamically adapt to time-varying needs of modern workloads. Integrated voltage regulators provide one of the most promising approaches to address energy and scalability constraints. Integrated voltage regulators offer advantages of nanosecond-scale voltage transition times, more efficient current delivery to the load at high power levels, and significant benefits in form-factor and system-level power management. This project aims to develop a systematic approach to answer questions surrounding the benefits and overheads associated with embedding integrated voltage regulators in future chips.