Sustainable Hardware Specialization
Pranav Dangi, Thilini Kaushalya Bandara, Saeideh Sheikhpour, Tulika Mitra, Lieven Eeckhout · 2024
Hardware specialization is commonly viewed as a way to scale performance in the dark silicon era with modern-day SoCs featuring multiple tens of dedicated accelerators. By only powering on hardware circuitry when needed, accelerators fundamentally trade off chip area for power efficiency. Dark silicon however comes with a severe downside, namely its environmental footprint. While hardware specialization typically reduces the operational footprint through high energy efficiency, the embodied footprint incurred by integrating additional accelerators on chip leads to a net overall increase in environmental footprint, which has led prior work to conclude that dark silicon is not a sustainable design paradigm.