The new (system) balance of power and opportunities for optimizations

Power and energy are key design considerations across a spectrum of computing solutions, from large-scale data centers and supercomputers to mobile phones and wearable computers. Correspondingly, all these systems need to focus on efficiency: achieving higher performance and functionality at improved resource and energy usage. At the same time, emerging workload and technology trends provide additional unique challenges and opportunities for future efficient system designs. In this talk, I will discuss these trends and summarize common, and not-so-common, design practices to address efficiency. I will discuss the opportunities for "balanced" system designs where all the different resources in the system are used equally efficiently, and building on the original Amdahl-Case rules for system balance from the 1960s, show how updating and rethinking the definitions for system balance can provide opportunities for significant improvements.