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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @01:29AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31 2021, @01:29AM (#1192077)

    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

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday October 31 2021, @02:07AM (#1192083)

    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]