Harnessing the Power of Specialization for Sustainable Computing

Computing is critical to address some of the most pressing needs of humanity today, including climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, it is also the source of a significant and steadily increasing carbon toll, attributed in part to the exponential growth in energy-demanding workloads, such as artificial intelligence (AI). Due to the demise of Dennard scaling, we can no longer count on exponentially-improve energy efficiency of general-purpose processors. Therefore, today's operational efficiency gains rely on specialized hardware.