An ever growing list of readings I keep recommending to people.

Specialization Era

These readings provide a good overview of what motivates the need for specialized accelerators.

• Computing's Energy Problem. A classic Mark Horowitz paper that describes the fundamental energy limitations of general purpose processors: most of the energy (time, area, etc.) of a general-purpose processor is spent on deciding what computation to perform instead of performing it.

• Understanding Sources of Inefficiency in General-Purpose Chips. A follow-on to the previous paper that systematically studies the impact of architectural optimizations to a general-purpose processors.

• Designing and Modeling of Specialized Architectures (§1-2). The first two chapters of Sophia Shao's dissertation provide a pretty great introduction to the history of physical scaling laws and why their demise implies a need for specialized architectures.