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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

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

[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 [nextplatform.com] 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 [nextplatform.com]

"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.

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