Accelerating architecture research

With the recent demonstration of 32nm processors we have seen Moore's law providing another large increase in the number of transistors. While more transistors provides architects with a great opportunity, I believe we have been observing increasing challenges in finding the most effective uses for these transistors. Design team size, mask costs and fabrication costs are all increasing, thus there is increasing desire to make the right decisions about which research ideas to bring forward to design. Unfortunately, our existing evaluation methodologies are proving increasingly ineffective at providing compelling evidence that a new idea warrants inclusion in future designs. In this talk, I will elaborate on these challenges and discuss some approaches to improve on our ability to prove the merit of architectural ideas. In particular, there is a recent movement toward using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as the basis for the evaluating future systems. Therefore, I will outline the alternative approaches to using FPGAs with an emphasis on using FPGAs to do performance modeling. But designing hardware models is far more complicated than writing software models, so included in the discussion will be techniques to reduce that complexity. These will include a practical approach to modularizing the model, separation of the functional and timing aspects of the simulation, and additional infrastructure important for performance modeling.