In the electronics industry, dark silicon is the amount of circuitry of an integrated circuit that cannot be powered-on at the nominal operating voltage for a given thermal design power (TDP) constraint.
This discontinuation of scaling has led to sharp increases in power density that hamper powering-on all transistors simultaneously while keeping temperatures in a safe operating range.
[3] The emergence of dark silicon introduces several challenges for the architecture, electronic design automation (EDA), and hardware-software co-design communities.
These include the question of how best to utilize the plethora of transistors (with potentially many dark ones) when designing and managing energy-efficient on-chip many-core processors under peak power and thermal constraints.
[7] In particular, they have demonstrated thermal, reliability (soft error and aging), and process variation concerns for dark silicon many-core processors.