This week’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow reportedly will feature much discussion about how technology can and needs to play a much more significant role in countering the pace and effects of climate change.
This also was a central theme at last month’s Arm DevSummit and a topic that Arm itself has been focusing on for much of 2021 with its efforts to contribute to what it and other computing sector firms have taken to calling the decarbonization of computing.
“The proliferation of technology has serious ramifications for our planet,” said Arm CEO Simon Segars during a keynote speech at the Arm DevSummit. “The ways that technology can be used to solve climate challenges will be front and center at this year’s U.N. conference on climate change, and we want everyone in the Arm ecosystem to be part of the solution.”
Segars added that Arm aims to achieve CO2 neutrality in 2023. “Low power computing has been part of our DNA and Arm is focused on driving further efficiencies so that together we can decarbonize compute.”
The efforts of Arm and other semiconductor companies that have been sending similar messages about increasing energy efficiency and decarbonizing compute boil down to an increased focus on performance per watt as an industry metric and development goal.
It may be disingenuous to say that fighting climate change is the only motivation behind reduced power consumption and performance per watt in semiconductors--reducing power also lowers costs and enables smaller form factor devices for applications like automotive and robotics--but the increasing focus on these issues in chip design also has carried the industry down a more planet-pleasing path.
Nitin Rao, senior vice president of global infrastructure at Arm customer Cloudflare, also spoke during Segars’ DevSummit keynote about how Cloudflare is intent on adopting technology with the “ultimate performance per watt” to help make its global network as energy-efficient as possible. Rao said Arm’s NeoVerse server architecture helps it achieve this goal by enabling “57% more Internet requests for every watt” compared to previous server technology.
Brett Bibby, senior vice president of product at gaming engine developer Unity, also spoke during Arm DevSummit about the use of “logically-oriented data” in developing to allow more compute resources to be put into action at the same time, “maximizing energy use over a minimum amount of time.”
Bibby said his firm’s Unity Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) enables high-performance data-oriented computing, and that by using DOTS to simultaneously update 10,000 moving objects is can save 6 milliseconds over its standard time goal, a small figure that when extrapolated across 1 million players using its gaming engine for 10 minutes per day translates to 6.8 years in recovered CPU time per day, a massive reduction in idle time that typically contributes to CPU energy usage.
As Segars noted, the challenge of decarbonizing computing will only grow in the future as more devices come online with the advancing maturity of technology movements like IoT, 5G and AI, leading to even more pervasive computing, so the time to embed power efficiency efforts into chip and product development efforts is now.
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