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Intel Targeting Zettascale (1000 Exaflops) by 2027?
[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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29 2021, @03:50PM (7 children)
if intel fails, computing will be something for the rich only ... and even they will have to pay thru the nose.
everybody else will be using mobile dumb (but marketed as "smart") phone-home terminals with food-like expiration dates ...
then again, all backend, today, from factory, logistics, stockmarket, inventory, etc etc, the "animal brain of the world economy" is still x86 ...
nobody wants a, for example, warehousing databse to run on a chip and OS welded together that "expires" in 3 years ... then again maybe this will give each factory/industry a leg up that has a in-house design team (like a IT engineering sub-department) that can design a custom chip and set it off to taiwan to print on their chip printers and receive their chip in a fortnight? so it's not about how good your product is but how good (and cheap) you can manage it?
then again, if you're in transport you're prolly not stupid and got stocks in some exxon or shell or whatnot so the dividends offset your cost, or sumething?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29 2021, @04:32PM
There is AMD, open hardware, and more.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 29 2021, @05:22PM (5 children)
I could be happy with Raspberry Pi level compute capability from here to eternity. I would probably have a farm of 100 of them on my home network if they were all I could buy, but at $35 a piece that farm would still be cheaper than my 1991 $5k desktop dev machine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sgleysti on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:30AM (4 children)
I'm with you on Raspberry Pi being sufficient.
What I'd really love way more than increases in hardware performance is software that is more responsive, less resource intensive, and less buggy...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 30 2021, @03:28AM
Better software could be achieved by "treading water" or even moving "backwards" in hardware-land.
Q: Why does software have bugs?
A: Programming computers is complicated.
Q: Why is programming computers complicated?
A: Computers are complicated
Q: Why are computers complicated
A: It pays more like that
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 30 2021, @02:47PM (2 children)
The software stack is definitely bloated, and I'm not sure there's a viable cure for that... I've been using the Qt API since 2006, and I'm hopeful that their foray into embedded systems will help keep the algorithms tight on the desktop, but anytime I "step into" in the debugger, every access to an object in a container seems to hop through 4+ layers before reaching the data I'm after. I guess the message is that "containers are for rapid development, bare metal C arrays are for speed."
With Qt and similar, you can at least ditch the OS and fast boot a Pi or similar system, though I must confess: I have never actually done this myself, the convenience of a Linux desktop / CLI is just too alluring and apparently I find it an acceptable trade for long boot times.
I'd really like to see the Pi 4 level performance remain constant and the price drop (which, effectively, it is dropping through currency inflation), the only thing I feel the other Pis lack is RAM, and that's only lacking when you're running a bloated browser (and aren't they all?)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @01:29AM (1 child)
Pi 4 performance is unusally slow for using Cortex-A72, owing to either the weak, proprietary GPU or unoptimized hardware acceleration. Low-end x86 is a better choice for almost any Linux user.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 31 2021, @02:07AM
Oh, yeah, my "standard" go-to desktop system for the past 10+ years has been Ubuntu on whatever the latest Core i5 NUC is with 2x whatever the "standard" RAM is for the year. Pis are for playtime. I have a Pi Zero on the boat that serves video to a little screen and bluetooth to the speakers, the Kodi menus are painfully slow, but the playback is flawless. One of the kids has a similar setup in their bedroom to play their movies on a dumb-screen in their room, and the other has a Pi 4 desktop he used to use for web browsing, youtube, minecraft, etc. until I got him a Chinese smartphone that is his go-to for everything now. Then there are scattered Pis around the place doing various headless stuff. The living room Kodi/Netflix i5 NUC is running ZoneAlarm "in the background" watching the outside cameras, and there's a Pi Zero connected to a speaker that plays bird calls when ZoneAlarm detects significant motion, another one is running a continuous MP3 shuffle player that I intend to some-day install in a car or two to replace the radio.
Pi definitely isn't a performance optimized design, I'd say it's a cost optimized design - and that's O.K. I do hope they continue to keep focus on low power consumption, and low price, first and worry about getting better performance out of their chips after the first two are taken care of. I've got two Pi 2 Ws on the way, one to replace the boat media center, and another just to play around with.
🌻🌻 [google.com]