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Lecture
Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
This lecture delves into the inefficiencies of general-purpose processors, the rise of hardware specialization, and the utilization wall in chip design. The instructor presents case studies, such as high-definition video encoding, to illustrate the advantages of ASICs over processors. Various strategies, including SIMD, ILP, and magic instructions, are explored to achieve ASIC-like efficiencies. The lecture concludes with a discussion on the importance of customization in chip design and the potential of chip generators. Special focus is given to the Widx unit, a specialized hardware for index lookups, showcasing significant improvements in throughput and energy efficiency.