For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection

Garbage collection is meant to spare programmers from having to manually address this unnecessary data, but the automated process that CPUs are tasked with consumes a lot of computational power—up to 10 percent or more of the total time a CPU spends on an application. For instance, CPUs have to complete some garbage collection actions in a certain order, whereas the new accelerator unit exploits the fact that these actions do not need to be done sequentially. Maas points out that although the 10 percent of computation power that CPUs dedicate to garbage collection may not seem like a lot, globally this represents a large amount of computing resources.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org