Potential and Limitation of High-Frequency Cores and Caches

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance potential and limitations of cryogenic semiconductor and superconductor electronics for high-speed, low-power computing, using modeling and simulation to evaluate their benefits and challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive performance analysis and modeling of cryogenic and superconductor computing cores using gem5, highlighting their potential speedups and cache bandwidth limitations.

Findings

Potential speedups with cryogenic and superconductor cores

Limitations due to cache bandwidth constraints

Insights into design trade-offs for future research

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of cryogenic semiconductor computing and superconductor electronics as promising alternatives to traditional semiconductor devices. As semiconductor devices face challenges such as increased leakage currents and reduced performance at higher temperatures, these novel technologies offer high performance and low power computation. Conventional semiconductor electronics operating at cryogenic temperatures (below -150{\deg}C or 123.15 K) can benefit from reduced leakage currents and improved electron mobility. On the other hand, superconductor electronics, operating below 10 K, allow electrons to flow without resistance, offering the potential for ultra-low-power, high-speed computation. This study presents a comprehensive performance modeling and analysis of these technologies and provides insights into their potential benefits and limitations. We implement models of in-order and out-of-order cores operating at high clock frequencies associated with superconductor electronics and cryogenic semiconductor computing in gem5. We evaluate the performance of these components using workloads representative of real-world applications like NPB, SPEC CPU2006, and GAPBS. Our results show the potential speedups achievable by these components and the limitations posed by cache bandwidth. This work provides valuable insights into the performance implications and design trade-offs associated with cryogenic and superconductor technologies, laying the foundation for future research in this field using gem5.