Coming Challenges in Microarchitecture and Architecture

In the past several decades, the world of computers and especially that of microprocessors has witnessed phenomenal advances. Computers have exhibited ever-increasing performance and decreasing costs, making them more affordable and, in turn, accelerating additional software and hardware development that fueled this process even more. The technology that enabled this exponential growth is a combination of advancements in process technology, microarchitecture, architecture, and design and development tools. While the pace of this progress has been quite impressive over the last two decades, it has become harder and harder to keep up this pace. New process technology requires more expensive megafabs and new performance levels require larger die, higher power consumption, and enormous design and validation effort. Furthermore, as CMOS technology continues to advance, microprocessor design is exposed to a new set of challenges. In the near future, microarchitecture has to consider and explicitly manage the limits of semiconductor technology, such as wire delays, power dissipation, and soft errors. In this paper, we describe the role of microarchitecture in the computer world, present the challenges ahead of us, and highlight areas where microarchitecture can help address these challenges.