LAUSR

......The March/April issue of IEEE Micro traditionally features a set of articles from the latest Hot Chips conference. Hot Chips is the annual conference presenting cutting-edge microprocessor designs in industry, research labs, and academia. Bryan Chin of OnRamp BioInformatics and Subhasish Mitra of Stanford University were program co-chairs of the Hot Chips 2016 conference, and they served as guest editors for this special issue. Bryan and Subhasish did an excellent job recruiting and selecting articles for this special issue. I wholeheartedly thank them for having done such a wonderful job. The special issue includes a broad spectrum of microprocessor designs. Four of the seven articles are from industry, with Nvidia introducing the Pascal GPU and NVLink Interconnect, IBM introducing the Power9 processor architecture, Intel introducing the new Skylake microarchitecture, and ARM introducing the Scalable Vector Extension. The other three articles originate from academia. Two articles describe many-core processors, one for task-parallel applications and one for multitenant clouds. The third article introduces a neural network accelerator. See the Guest Editors’ Introduction column on page 5 for a brief introduction to these articles. In addition to these theme articles, this issue also includes a feature article. In “Fat Caches for Scale-Out Servers,” Stavros Volos and colleagues deal with highcapacity caches for scale-out servers. The proposed memory system architecture employs a page-based organization in stacked DRAM with metadata stored in SRAM. This issue also includes several departments. In the Awards department, Margaret Martonosi of Princeton University reports on the 2016 Maurice Wilkes Award. The award was given to Timothy Sherwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “for contributions to novel program analysis advancing architectural modeling and security.” Tim is best known for his work on Basic Block Vectors and their use in program phase analysis and detection. I join the Maurice Wilkes Award committee in congratulating Tim Sherwood. The Micro Law department features a contribution by Richard Stern about the Federal Trade Commission and Apple suing Qualcomm for cell phone standardization skullduggery. Finally, in the Micro Economics column, Share Greenstein writes about the value of free information technology on GDP. With that, I wish you happy reading, as always!