The goal of modern processor chip design has changed from optimizing various speed/price/heat tradeoffs for applications to finding excuses for dumping more transistors into the device. Heard an interesting talk from Krisztián Flautner of ARM at the ACISC conference and I have to admit that it’s not entirely the fault of the chip designers – since they design for operating systems that have stalled for 30 years or more.
Parallelism and multicore