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How have power and cooling been doing with respect to chip improvements? Have power requirements per operation been coming down rapidly, as other features have
by schoen 2y ago
How have power and cooling been doing with respect to chip improvements? Have power requirements per operation been coming down rapidly, as other features have improved?
My recollection from PC CPUs is that we've gotten many more operations per second, and many more operations per second per dollar, but that the power and corresponding cooling requirements for the CPUs have tended to go up as well. I don't really know what power per operation has looked like there. (I guess it's clearly improved, though, because it seems like the power consumption of a desktop PC has only increased by a single order of magnitude, while the computational capacity has increased by more than that.)
A reason that I wonder about this in this context is that people are saying that the power and cooling requirements for these devices are currently enormous (by individual or hobbyist standards, not by data center standards!). If we imagine a Moore's Law-style improvement where the hardware itself becomes 1/10 or 1/100 of its current price, would we expect the overall power consumption to be similarly reduced, or to remain closer to its current levels?
- chaxor 2y agoMooers law in the consumer space seems to be pretty much asymptoting now, as indicated by Apple's amazing Macbooks with an astounding 8GB of RAM. Data center compute is arguable, as it tends to be catered to some niche, making it confusing (cerebras as an example vs GPU datacenters vs more standard HPC). Also Clusters and even GPUs don't really fit in to Mooers law as originally framed.