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AMD’s Xilinx-enhanced Epycs will get datacenters' attention

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Same goes for Arm, for the same reason: Power efficiency
Comment AMD’s plans to integrate AI functionality from its Xilinx FPGAs with its Epyc server microprocessors presents several tantalizing opportunities for systems builders and datacenter operators alike, Glenn O’Donnell, research director at Forrester, told The Register. A former semiconductor engineer, O’Donnell leads Forrester’s datacenter and networking studies. He sees several benefits to the kind of tight integration at the die or package level promised by AMD’s future CPUs. “The more you can put on the same die or on the same package, the better,” he said. One of the biggest benefits of integrating dedicated accelerators — like Xilinx’s AI engine — onto the CPU package is power consumption. It takes a lot of power to bring data on and off of the chip, O’Donnell said. “If you can do it on chip or on package, it’s going to be a lot more efficient.” And power consumption is a major concern for OEMs and datacenter operators, many of which have announced sweeping carbon neutrality goals in recent years. So it’s no surprise why AMD CTO Mark Papermaster suggested domain-specific processors — like Xilinx FPGAs — will play a key role in meeting the company’s ambitious goal of delivering a 30-fold increase in power efficiency across its high-performance compute portfolio by 2025. Greater power efficiency has other benefits that indirectly contribute to lower datacenter operating costs. The less efficient the chip, the greater the ratio of power that gets turned into waste heat, O’Donnell explained. “Something that’s hard to cool means a lot of the electrical power you’re drawing is just going up in smoke. It’s generating heat instead of doing compute,” he said. “The more we can shift that towards compute and away from heat, that’s better for everybody, especially the planet.

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