Chip Design Cuts Data Centre Power Draw by a Third
The gain comes from moving less data, not from a faster process node.
By Sanly Wire1 min read
Engineers have published a processor design that cuts energy use in data centre workloads by roughly a third without a corresponding drop in throughput.
The saving does not come from a smaller manufacturing process, which is where most efficiency gains have come from historically. It comes from reorganising how memory and compute cores exchange data, so that far less information travels across the chip. Moving data, not computing on it, accounts for a large share of energy use in modern processors.
Two cloud providers have begun trials. Independent verification is limited so far, and the published figures come from the design team's own benchmarks.