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posted by martyb on Friday October 29 2021, @12:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the where-did-it-ever-go? dept.

Intel Targeting Zettascale (1000 Exaflops) by 2027?

'We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted' says Intel CEO on quest to keep Moore's Law alive

[Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger] showed a chart tracking the semiconductor giant progressing along a trend line to 1 trillion transistors per device by 2030. "Today we are predicting that we will maintain or even go faster than Moore's law for the next decade,"[*] Gelsinger said.

[...] In a Q&A session after his keynote, Gelsinger revealed that achieving zettascale computing using Intel technology "in 2027 is a huge internal initiative."

Intel Aims For Zettaflops By 2027, Pushes Aurora Above 2 Exaflops

"But to me, the other thing that's really exciting in the space is our Zetta Initiative, where we have said we are going to be the first to zettascale by a wide margin," Gelsinger told The Next Platform. "And we are laying out as part of the Zetta Initiative what we have to do in the processor, in the fabric, in the interconnect, and in the memory architecture — what we have to do for the accelerators, and the software architecture to do it. So, zettascale in 2027 is a huge internal initiative that is going to bring many of our technologies together. 1,000X in five years? That's pretty phenomenal."

[...] If you built a zettaflops Aurora machine today, assuming all of the information that we have is correct, it would take 411.5X as many nodes to do the job. So, that would be somewhere around 3.7 million nodes with 7.4 million CPUs and 22.2 million GPUs burning a mind-sizzling 24.7 gigawatts. Yes, gigawatts. Clearly, we are going to need some serious Moore's Law effects in transistors and packaging.

If Intel doubled compute density every year for both its CPU and GPU components, it would still take somewhere around 116,000 nodes to do the zettaflops trick. And if it could keep the node power constant — good heavens, that is a big IF — it would still be 772 megawatts. Lowering the power and the node count while driving up performance by a factor of 411.5X on the node and system level ... tilt.

And here we were thinking the next five years were going to be boring. Apparently, we are going to witness technical advances so great they will qualify as magic. We look forward to seeing how this Zetta Initiative unfolds. You got our attention, Pat.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Says Moore's Law is Back

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says Moore's Law is back:

Moore's Law, the gauge of steady processor progress from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has taken a beating in recent years. But it's making a comeback, Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said Wednesday.

"Moore's law is alive and well," Gelsinger said at the company's online Innovation Day event. "Today we are predicting that we will maintain or even go faster than Moore's law for the next decade."

[...] But miniaturization has faltered as research and manufacturing grows ever more expensive. Chip elements are reaching atomic scales and power consumption problems limit the clock speeds that keep chip processing steps marching in lockstep.

As a result, people use Moore's Law these days often to refer to progress in performance and power consumption as well as the ability to pack more transistors more densely on a chip.

Gelsinger, though, was referring to the traditional definition referring to the number of transistors on a processor -- albeit a processor that could consist of several slices of silicon built into a single package. "We expect to even bend the curve faster than a doubling every two years," he said.

Success will mean Intel just catches up to rivals, a moment Gelsinger has pledged will happen in 2024.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29 2021, @01:28PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29 2021, @01:28PM (#1191662)

    This is all meaningless cheerleading to pump up their flagging stock.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday October 29 2021, @02:16PM (3 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Friday October 29 2021, @02:16PM (#1191684) Journal

    Sure, it's kind of a PR stunt. Doesn't mean it's not relevant. Sure, I like the bare naked hardware specs as much as the next nerd, but speculative future technology is also interesting. Certainly more interesting than reading about how Fusion Reactors are soon to be realized in the next 25 to 30 years. Again, after the same claim was made 25 to 30 years ago.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:12AM (2 children)

      by mrchew1982 (3565) on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:12AM (#1191883)

      But there's no explanation of *how* they plan to do this... The "how" would be news for nerds, some empty boast that we're going to "x" is just pr.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:40AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:40AM (#1191892) Journal

        The "how" is mostly going to involve 3D stacking and packaging. They did already outline some steps [soylentnews.org] that would result in "50x gate density" from chips made on the current "Intel 7" process node.

        Getting to 1000x in 5 years would almost certainly involve a 3DSoC approach that puts layers of memory (gigabytes) nanometers away from CPU or GPU cores. Even with gains in other areas, there's probably a 100x to account for in there and that's the only way I can imagine it being done. Unless they are lying.

        Zettascale implies the relevant products would be an evolution of the Ponte Vecchio GPUs [soylentnews.org] for high performance computing that are in development.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 30 2021, @07:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 30 2021, @07:13PM (#1192003)
        The "how" is going to be adding more nodes to the computer cluster - which means Moore's law no longer is in effect, and never again will be. Adding more cpus to a die is also a cheat.

        So is increasing clock speeds. Increasing clock speeds, theoughput, etc doesn't increase the number of transistors in a cpu.

        It's a race between software bloat and hardware improvements, and bloat has won. Get over it.