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AMD wants to make its chips 30 times more energy-efficient by 2025
Today, [AMD] announced its most ambitious goal yet—to increase the energy efficiency of its Epyc CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators 30 times by 2025. This would help data centers and supercomputers achieve high performance with significant power savings over current solutions.
If it achieves this goal, the savings would add up to billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity saved in 2025 alone, meaning the power required to perform a single calculation in high-performance computing tasks will have decreased by 97 percent.
Increasing energy efficiency this much will involve a lot of engineering wizardry, including AMD's stacked 3D V-Cache chiplet technology. The company acknowledges the difficult task ahead of it, now that "energy-efficiency gains from process node advances are smaller and less frequent."
In addition to compute node performance/Watt measurements, to make the goal particularly relevant to worldwide energy use, AMD uses segment-specific datacenter power utilization effectiveness (PUE) with equipment utilization taken into account. The energy consumption baseline uses the same industry energy per operation improvement rates as from 2015-2020, extrapolated to 2025. The measure of energy per operation improvement in each segment from 2020-2025 is weighted by the projected worldwide volumes multiplied by the Typical Energy Consumption (TEC) of each computing segment to arrive at a meaningful metric of actual energy usage improvement worldwide.
See the 25x20 Initiative from a few years ago.
See also: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to unveil new AI technologies and products at GTC Keynote in November
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @10:38AM (6 children)
Do you really think those data centers and supercomputers will actually spend 1 watt less than they did before? I bet they just push more calculations on those systems, to process more than reduce power usage.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @11:11AM
Actually yes, they do. Like an IBM mainframe that used 10kW supply and now uses 4kW in same frame is probably going to reduce the energy consumption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @11:51AM (4 children)
Car analogy:
AMD is getting ahead of (or giving lip service to) the coming fuel economy regulations (CAFE in USA) for computers.
More generally, how long before the regulators of car efficiency start to aim at the computing industry? Don't say it isn't going to happen--that's what the car industry said at first, about 50 years ago, but society (and thus government) said different.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 30 2021, @12:07PM
So is Intel, with Alder/Raptor/Meteor/Etcetera Lake *****mont efficiency cores.
Also, the car is a computer:
Intel pushes the European car business [eenewseurope.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @04:38PM (1 child)
Parent said:
"Don't say it isn't going to happen--that's what the car industry said at first, about 50 years ago, but society (and thus government) said different."
"Society" didn't do any such thing. Ask the public if they are demanding another 1 mpg, regardless of addition to vehicle cost to achieve this, or reduction in vehicle interior space, or increase in cost to repair vehicle. Like just about everything, the govt mandates are pushed by small pressure groups.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @04:42PM
Let's not forget sluggish acceleration to improve MPG.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday September 30 2021, @08:50PM
After CAFE the public went out and started buying massive SUVs, which seem to outnumber cars these days in many places. Not exactly a resounding success.
In the computing space, hardware has become orders of magnitude more efficient over time without government intervention. And the public has already responded by running software that is orders of magnitude less efficient to cancel that out. It's too late for the government to step in and turn it into a clown show because it already is one. If they were honest (but not necessarily sane) they would try to regulate the software. That would at least be entertaining to watch.