AMD Lays The Path To Zettascale Computing: Talks CPU & GPU Performance Plus Efficiency Trends, Next-Gen Chiplet Packaging & More

wccftech.com:

AMD talked about the future of computing, laying out its CPU & GPU trends in terms of efficiency & performance during the ISSCC 2023 conference.

AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, took the stage and started the talk by highlighting the progress that has been made over the past 10 years. At ISSCC 2013, AMD talked about one of its earliest HSA APUs, Richland, which featured up to 1.3 Billion transistors, 4 cores, 4 threads, a Monolithic 32nm SOI process, and 4 MB of total cache. Fast forward to 2023, and AMD now offers 90 billion transistors, 96 cores, 192 threads on a singular chip with 13 chiplets that utilize 5nm and 6nm process nodes with 386 MB of cache.

That's significant progress that's been made over the past 10 years and based on the performance trends of the last decade, the industry has been improving the mainstream server performance by 2x every 2.4 years. The same is the case for GPUs which have seen the performance increase by 2x every 2 years or so. Now AMD has already become the first tech company in the industry to break past the Exascale barrier with the Frontier supercomputer so the next goal is to reach for the even harder Zettascale mark.

It will take slightly over 10 years to achieve Zettascale given a performance increase of 2x every 1.2 years. That is by taking advantage of all the technology that is available at the moment but when it comes to efficiency, it's not a linear progression-like performance. As per the CPU & GPU efficiency trends, we are starting to see the progress flattening out so while achieving Zettascale performance in the next 10 years or so will be achievable, it will come at a significant efficiency cost.

A Zettascale level system with an efficiency of 2140 GF/Watt is said to consume around