Prof. Mitra (National University of Singapore)

Moore´s Law enables continued increase in the number of cores on chip; but power and thermal limits imply that a significantfraction of these cores have to be left switched off --- or dark --- at any point in time.This phenomenon, known as darksilicon, is driving the emergence of heterogeneous/asymmetric computing platforms consisting of cores with diverse power-performance characteristics enabling better match between the application requirements and the compute engine leading tosubstantially improved energy-efficiency. In this talk, we present the challenges and opportunities offered by static andadaptive heterogeneous multi-cores towards low-power, high-performance mobile computing.
For static asymmetric multi-cores, we present a comprehensive power management framework that can provide highperformance while minimizing energy consumption within the thermal design power budget. We then describe an adaptiveheterogeneous multi-core architecture, called Bahurupi, that can be tailored according to the application by software.Bahurupi is designed and fabricated as a homogeneous multi-core system containing identical simple cores. Post-fabrication,software can configure or compose together the primitive cores to create a heterogeneous multi-core that best matches theneeds of the currently executing application.