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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, @07:22PM (1 child)
It would be nice if these improvements trickled down to consumer desktop and laptop processors so nano scale solar would be more practical for off grid living, etc.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 30 2021, @11:46PM
IDK what nanoscale solar means for your power budget but laptops and desktops are obviously much more performant and efficient these days. You can even get a half decent desktop experience from smartphones, e.g. Samsung DeX, which is being copied by Xiaomi [youtube.com] and others.
x86 CPUs/APUs in the 5-65 Watt range have advanced tremendously and will continue to do so for at least a few years. AMD and Intel are hanging around the "7nm" FinFET nodes and haven't even gotten to "2nm" gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFET) yet.
Both AMD and Intel are going to put machine learning accelerators [digitaltrends.com] on die because you don't really need too many CPU cores anymore. It remains to be seen how useful that will be but features [9to5google.com] using it are available. Integrated graphics performance will also go way up, e.g. up to 192 EUs on Meteor Lake desktop chips, and possibly 320 EUs on mobile (Arrow Lake).
You can pick up a 5700G, 5600H, 5500U, i5-11400, etc. today and have a decent experience. Alder Lake (mobile) and Rembrandt in 2022 will be great upgrades. Whatever is available in 2025 will be incredible, and I think that would still be pre-GAAFET.
TL;DR get trickled on.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]