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January 16, Tuesday
10:00 – 12:00

The computer industry has been able to keep an exponential improvement in performance for the last few decades. This unbelievable phenomenon is known as "Moore's law". As the computer architecture industry start reaching the "power wall", two new trends are being developed; the first trend calls to trade single thread performance with multithreaded performance and so to increase the overall performance of a processor by accommodate it with large number of small cores. The second trend calls to increase both the single thread performance and the multithreaded performance and so to divide the "transistor budget" of the processor between relatively small number of "large cores".

In this talk I will present the root cause of the "power wall", I will extend the discussion on each of the new trends in computer architectures described above and provide an analysis of what is needed for each of them to succeed. I will conclude the talk with a discussion on few open research topics which I believe are important for the computer architecture industry.

Bio: Avi Mendelson is a principal engineer in Intel’s Mobile Platform Group in Haifa, Israel, and adjunct professor in the CS and EE departments, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He received his B.Sc. and M.S.c degrees from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and his Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Avi has been with Intel for 7 years. He started as senior researcher in Intel Labs, later he moved to the Microprocessor group where he served as the CMP architect of Intel Core Duo. Avi's work and research interests are in computer architecture, low power design, parallel systems, OS related issues and virtualization. His e-mail address is avi.mendelson@intel.com