undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmort964y ago0 comments

The term "dark silicon" refers to silicon that's not (currently) in use, such as when you have a workload which only exercises one arithmetic unit of one core even if you have 8 cores with 4 arithmetic units each (only one arithmetic unit is "lit up", 63 are "dark"). There's no reason to believe that what you're calling "dark bytes" isn't actively used while executing the program.

0 comments

knz424y ago

Dark silicon is not used all the time - that's the key point.

In the same way, the functab data in Go is not used all the time either, only when generating stack traces.

Also since that original article from 2011 was published, the phrase "dark silicon" was extended to designate silicon IP which is not directly necessary for a given target application but is embedded for the occasional use by a niche in the same market.

In the same way, all languages (not just Go) embed constructs in generated code that are there only to handle edge cases in certain applications/deployments, and are inactive for 90%+ of executions.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsmort964y ago0 comments

0 comments

knz424y ago

Dark silicon is not used all the time - that's the key point.

In the same way, the functab data in Go is not used all the time either, only when generating stack traces.

In the same way, all languages (not just Go) embed constructs in generated code that are there only to handle edge cases in certain applications/deployments, and are inactive for 90%+ of executions.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse