CS302 GDB1 Solution and discussion

[zaasmi]

In circuit designing industry, the focus is on transistor density, clock speed and power/performance ratio optimization. Due to the emergence of Dark Silicon issue, the focus has shifted entirely on power/performance ratio. Performance and power tradeoff is still the most crucial issue in the design of circuits. Suppose you are working on the design of a processor for a Radar System. Which one of the parameters (Performance or Power) will you consider being the most important in this situation?

Justify your answer with good reasons.

[moaaz]

The large energy cost of memory fetches limits the overallefficiency of applications no matter how efficient the ac-celerators are on the chip. As a result the most importantoptimization must be done at the algorithm level, to reduce off-chip memory accesses, to createDark Memory. The algorithmsmust first be (re)written for both locality and parallelism beforeyou tailor the hardware to accelerate them.Using Pareto curves in theenergy/opandmm2/(op/s)spaceallows one to quickly evaluate different accelerators, memorysystems, and even algorithms to understand the trade-offsbetween performance, power and die area. This analysis isa powerful way to optimize chips in the Dark Silicon era.

[Khuram Shahzad]