Electronic – Is Dark Silicon a good thing or a bad thing

integrated-circuittransistors

Recently in my computer architecture lecture my professor just mentioned the topic of Dark Silicon for a minute or less. But I found that topic interesting and searched the internet. What I found out from wiki is that

In the electronics industry, dark silicon is the amount of circuitry
of an integrated circuit that cannot be powered-on at the nominal
operating voltage for a given thermal design power (TDP) constraint.

But I was not able to get is it a good thing or a bad thing? Say if my rest of the circuitry is switched off when other part is working doesn't it lead to power utilization? And which is in turn a good thing. Or does it affect parallel computing?

Best Answer

It is neither good nor bad, it just "is". Modern low nm processes make very leaky transistors, so if you can remove power completely, it saves leakage power.

It's good in the sense that you can fit more interesting and specialised logic into an SoC. When compared to splitting this into multiple ICs, it's always faster and lower power to integrate into a single die.

It's bad in the sense that you can't use all the parts of the chip at the same time. There are hardware and software mechanisms that will throttle or disable parts of the chip depending on the thermal environment and the work load.

To answer your question about parallel computing, it absolutely does impact that. A modern CPU often has 4 or more cores present, and it's unlikely they can all be run all full speed/activity simultaneously.

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