Video: Bill Dally on Scaling Performance in the Post-Dennard Era

“It was indicated in my keynote this morning there are two really fundamental challenges we’re facing in the next two years in all sorts of computing – from supercomputers to cell phones. The first is that of energy efficiency. With the end of Dennard scaling, we’re no longer getting a big improvement in performance per watt from each technology generation. The performance improvement has dropped from a factor of 2.8 x back when we used to scale supply voltage with each new generation, now to about 1.3 x in the post-Dennard era. With this comes a real challenge for us to come up with architecture techniques and circuit techniques for better performance per watt.”