On the Implication of NTC versus Dark Silicon on Emerging Scale Scale-Out Out Workloads: The Multi Multi-Core Architecture Perspective
Abstract: The end of Dennard's scaling poses computer systems, especially the datacenters, in front of both power and utilization walls. One possible solution to combat the power and utilization walls is dark silicon where transistors are under-utilized under in the chip, but this will result in a diminishing performance. Another solution is Near-Threshold Threshold Voltage Computing (NTC) which ope operates rates transistors in the nearnear threshold region and provides much more flexible tradeoffs between power and performance. However, prior efforts largely focus on a specific design option based on the legacy desktop applications, therefore, lacking comprehensive comprehens analysis of emerging scale--out out applications with multiple design options when dark silicon and/or NTC are/is applied. In this paper, we characterize different perspectives including performance, energy efficiency and reliability in the context of NTC/dark ark silicon cloud processors running emerging scale-out scale workloads on various architecture designs. We find NTC is generally an effective way to alleviate the power challenge over scale scale-out out applications compared with dark silicon, it can improve performance by 1.6X, energy efficiency by 50 percent and the reliability problem can be relieved by ECC. Meanwhile, we also observe tiled-OoO OoO architecture improves the performance by 20 20âˆź370 370 percent and energy efficiency by 40 âˆź 600 percent over alternative architectu architecture re designs, making it a preferable design paradigm for scale scale-out workloads. We believe that our