Is Dark Silicon a good thing or a bad thing?
It is neither good nor bad, it just &quot;is&quot;. Modern low nm processes make very leaky transistors, so if you can remove power completely, it saves leakage power.
It's good in the sense that you can fit more interesting and specialised logic into an SoC. When compared to splitting this into multiple ICs, it's always faster and lower power to integrate into a single die.
It's bad in the sense that you can't use all the parts of the chip at the same time. There are hardware and software mechanisms that will throttle or disable parts of the chip depending on the thermal environment and the work load.
To answer your question about parallel computing, it absolutely does impact that. A modern CPU often has 4 or more cores present, and it's unlikely they can all be run all full speed/activity simultaneously.