Computer Architecture, the road ahead

Tuesday, 18th January, 2005
Michael Flynn, Stanford University.

Continuing progress in the scaling of the silicon technology enables continuing product evolution. But several shifts in design emphasis are occurring. In the first shift more emphasis is placed on lowering power by trading off increased speed. Power can be reduced by upwards to a factor of one million times from current power levels. In a second shift increased circuit density enables entire systems (computer plus memory and communications support) to be integrated on a chip. These shifts enable wearable (watch type) and other novel system oriented devices. As chip costs fall interconnections and design time dominate costs. Thus wireless/optical interconnections and reconfigurable logic become significantly more important.