A Microprocessor Design for 2014

October 5, 2001
Hamerschlag Hall D210
3:00 p.m.

Doug Burger
U. of Texas at Austin

Silicon devices have at least 15 years of physical scaling left. It is unclear, however, that we will be able to exploit the properties and densities of those devices effectively. The one-two punch of clocking limits and slower wires will make performance scaling more difficult than ever before, as will the growing unreliability of these devices.

In this talk, I will present a new class of microprocessor architectures, called Grid Processor Architectures (GPAs). GPAs are intended to show an order of magnitude higher performance, scale with technology, adapt to numerous application classes, and tolerate radiation or noise-induced soft errors. Finally, I will describe the prototype TRIPS chip being designed at UT-Austin, which contains multiple GPA cores on a single die.

Doug Burger is an Assistant Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison very late in 1998.

His research interests are in computer architecture and its many affiliated areas, and he is co-leader of the TRIPS project at UT-Austin.