That is not a good description of the concept of dark silicon. A better description would be, we cannot power all transistors at the same time because there is a power limit with regards to how much power a chip can consume.
Just because you may only be able to power x% of your chip, doesn't mean x% of your chip is useless. Some times you need to turn off parts of the chips anyways. Examples include cache misses or particular hardware flows. Other times you can decrease frequency due to program characteristics. For everything else we throttle because we cant power all the transistors at all times.
Just because you may only be able to power x% of your chip, doesn't mean x% of your chip is useless. Some times you need to turn off parts of the chips anyways. Examples include cache misses or particular hardware flows. Other times you can decrease frequency due to program characteristics. For everything else we throttle because we cant power all the transistors at all times.