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

移动计算设备，如手机、平板电脑和笔记本电脑已经成为现代生活的固定设备。此外，用户已经习惯了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翻倍，成本将不断降低。几乎同样长的时间里，人们一直在重复这句现在众所周知的格言：“没有指数是永远存在的”，并预测摩尔定律的最终终结。似乎终结即将来临，这激发了人们对低效率的研究，并在传统不同研究领域的交叉点寻找机会，以提高从移动设备到云计算服务器的计算范围内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，但将它们提升到更高的集成水平和粒度。有几个关键的挑战阻碍了计算的持续增长。无论是由于高性能计算系统的高冷却成本，还是由于移动设备的固定能量容量，电力预算的限制都需要创新，以允许未来具有更多核心的系统动态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源和可扩展性限制的最有前途的方法之一。集成稳压器提供纳秒级电压转换时间的优势，在高功率水平下更有效地向负载提供电流，并在外形因素和系统级电源管理方面具有显着优势。该项目旨在开发一种系统的方法来回答有关在未来芯片中嵌入集成电压调节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.