Computer Scientists Leverage Dark Silicon to Improve Smartphone Battery Life
GreenDroid Project GreenDroid HotChips Slides (PDF) Steven Swanson Michael Taylor Jacobs School of Engineering on Twitter GreenDroid chip prototype will deliver improved performance through specialized processors September 1, 2010 By Daniel Kane One example of a conservation core. The small boxes in the image are the pattern of logic gates that are spatially placed over a small portion of the GreenDroid chip. A new smartphone chip prototype under development at the University of California, San Diego will improve smartphone efficiency by making use of 'dark silicon' - the underused transistors in modern microprocessors. On August 23, UC San Diego computer scientists presented GreenDroid, the new smartphone chip prototype at the HotChips symposium in Palo Alto, CA. Dark silicon refers to the huge swaths of silicon transistors on today's chips that are underused because there is not enough power to utilize all the transistors at the same time. The new GreenDroid chip prototype from computer scientists at UC San Diego will deliver improved performance through specialized processors fashioned from dark silicon. These processors are designed to run heavily used chunks of code, called 'hot code,' in Google's Android smartphone platform. Computer science professors Michael Taylor and Steven Swanson from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering are leading the project. 'This is an exciting time for UCSD. Our students are designing a real multicore processing chip, in an advanced technology, that is simultaneously advancing the state-of-the art in both smartphone and processor design. This marks the first of what I hope is many such chips that will come out of the UCSD research community,?
