Domain-specific architectures take center stage for compute innovation as transistor scaling falls behind Moore’s law and compute domains proliferate.
Long-standing scaling trends in semiconductor process-technology innovation are slowing down. After several decades of remarkable compliance with Moore’s law—the observation that transistor density on a semiconductor wafer roughly doubles every two years—transistor scaling has meaningfully slowed in past years and is behind where Moore’s law would have predicted by a factor of about ten. Dennard scaling, the projection that power consumption per unit chip area remains constant as transistor density increases, is also failing, leading to an increasing need for complex cooling solutions in large data centers and other high-performance compute environments.
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