Scaling Trends: Transistors, Power, and Hardware Evolution

This lecture delves into the evolution of hardware systems, starting with the basics of transistors and their historical context, including Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling. It explores the challenges faced in the 80s due to power limitations and the transition to CMOS technology. The lecture discusses the demise of Dennard Scaling, the emergence of dark silicon, and the shift towards parallelism in modern hardware design. It covers the concepts of integration, specialization, and approximation in hardware units, with examples like Google's TPU and Apple's M1 chip. The lecture also contrasts scale-up and scale-out systems, highlighting their characteristics, failure tolerance strategies, and the convergence of these approaches in modern data centers.