A new golden age for computer architecture: hardware-software

A NEW GOLDEN AGE FOR COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE: HARDWARE-SOFTWARE

In the 1980s, Mead and Conway1 democratized high-level language and chip design programming surpassed assembly language programming, which made instruction set advances viable. Innovations like RISC, superscalar, multilevel caches, and speculation plus compiler advances ushered in a Golden Age of

computer architecture, when performance increased annually by 60%. In the later 1990s and 2000s, architectural innovation decreased, so performance came primarily from higher clock rates and larger caches. The ending of Dennard Scaling and Moore’s Law also slowed this path; single core performance improved only 3% last year! In addition to poor performance gains of modern microprocessors, it recently demonstrated timing attacks that leak information at high rates2.

We’re on the cusp of another Golden Age that will significantly improve cost, performance, energy, and security. These architecture challenges are even harder given that we’ve lost the exponentially increasing resources provided by Dennard scaling and Moore’s law. We’ve identified areas that are critical to this new age:

1)Free and Open Architectures and Open-Source Implementations

Progress on these issues likely will require changes to the instruction set architecture (ISA), which is problematic for proprietary ISAs. For tall challenges like these, we want all the best minds to work on them, not only the engineers who work for the ISA owners.

2) Enhancing Security

We’ve made tremendous gains in information technology (IT) in the past 40 years, but if security is a war, we’re losing it. Thus far, architects have been asked for little beyond page-level protection and supporting virtual machines. The very definition of computer architecture ignores timing, yet it shows that attacks that can determine timing of operations can leak supposedly protected data. It’s time for architects to redefine computer architecture and treat security as a first class citizen to protect data from timing attacks, or at worst reduce information leaks to a trickle.

3) Hardware/Software Co-Design, Domain-Specific Enhanced Security, and Agile Chip Development/ Open Instruction Sets

Advanced programming languages like Python and domain-specific languages like Tensor Flow have dramatically improved programmer productivity by increasing software reuse and by raising the level of abstraction. Whereas compiler-architecture co-design delivered gains of about three in the 1980s for C compilers and RISC architectures, new advances could create compilers and domain-specific architectures3 (DSAs) that deliver tenfold or more jumps4 in this new Golden Age.

Адрес публикации: https://www.prodlenka.org/metodicheskie-razrabotki/324400-a-new-golden-age-for-computer-architecture-ha