Idle Cycles Are Not Wasted Cycles

Idle network service cores are treated as wasted compute. This assumption motivates increasingly sophisticated mechanisms that reclaim idle cores at microsecond timescales. We argue that this view no longer matches modern server hardware. On contemporary multicore processors, active cores compete for a shared package-level power and thermal budget. Once that budget becomes the limiting resource, an idle core that waits efficiently returns compute capacity that hardware can redistribute to produ…

Source: arXiv cs.AR (Hardware Architecture), published 2026-11-02. The summary is the Hub's own; the full story is at the source. Report a rights or accuracy concern