Doi: 10.1145/1364782.1364799
How changes in computer architecture are about to impact everyone in the IT business.
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE research is undergoing a renewed vitality. no longer is the road ahead clear for microprocessors. indeed, a decade ago the road seemed straightforward: deeper pipelines, more complex microprocessors, and little change to the core instruction set architecture. no longer. for a variety of technological reasons, manufacturers have embraced multicore Cpus for the mainstream of desktop computing. such a change represents the biggest single risk these vendors have taken in decades, as they are now expecting software developers to embrace a programming model they have been reluctant to target in the past.
In this article I look back on computer architecture research over the past 10 years, including what accounted for this change and what will happen because of it. In addition, I survey the field of computer architecture research, looking at what types of problems we once thought were important to explore and how those problems are exacerbated or mitigated in the future.
Seven years ago, when I started as a young assistant professor, my computer science colleagues felt computer architecture was a solved problem. Words like “incremental” and “ narrow” were often used to describe research under way in the field. In some ways, who could blame them? To a software developer, the hardware/software interface—the very core of the computer architecture research field— had remained unchanged for most of their professional lifetimes. Even the key microarchitectural innovations (pipelining, branch prediction, caching, and others) appeared to be created long ago. From the perspective of the rest of computer science, architecture was a solved problem. This perception of computer architecture research had some very real consequences. NSF folded the computer architecture (CSA) program together with a grab bag of areas from VLSI to graphics into an omnibus “computing processes and artifacts” cluster. Large-scale DARPA programs to fund innovative architecture research in academia have recently wound down.
Around 2000, I would also characterize the collective mood of researchers in computer architecture as overly self-critical and bored of examining certain core topics in the field. The outside perspective of computer architecture had become the inside one. We would bemoan our field, nicknaming our premier technical conference as the “International Symposium on Cache Architecture,” instead of its true title “Computer Architecture.” We amusingly called our own innovations “yet another” 12 take on an old problem.
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