Energy efficiency improvements have slowed down, but there could be other methods to reducing HPC power needs, AMD CEO Lisa Su says.
The CEO of chip giant AMD has said that the high-performance computing (HPC) industry needs to start becoming significantly more efficient, or it will need to turn to nuclear energy.
AMD CPU and GPU performance typically double every 2.4 years which is good progress by any means, but power efficiency has not seen such considerable improvements.
Speaking at International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Dr Lisa Su noted that with zettaflop HPCs on the horizon, we should turn our attention to performance per unit of energy in order to make zettaflop computation a reality.Going nuclear
According to current trends and assuming that progress doesn’t slow down, AMD reckons that zettaflop computation could be here in about a decade (although Intel reckons it could be here in about half that time).
