The surging demand for artificial intelligence computing has a downside, according to chip-industry veteran Renee James: It’s sucking up too much energy to be sustainable.
Many data centers handling AI tasks have already outgrown the amount of power they can get from public utilities, said James, formerly a top executive at Intel Corp. But she sees this looming energy crisis as an opportunity for her current company, Ampere Computing, which makes processors that require less electricity.
“Who doesn’t love AI?” she said. “But we cannot continue to throw power at it. It just doesn’t work.”
Ampere, a five-year-old startup based in Intel’s hometown of Santa Clara, California, is unveiling new processors this week that offer more efficiency. Data center giants such as Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Alphabet Inc.’s Google already use Ampere’s current generation of chips, and James looks to make further inroads with her latest lineup, called AmpereOne.
The company packs its chips with a large number of computing cores that perform multiple calculations in parallel, letting them use less power. The top of the new range, the first Ampere product to use in-house designs rather than blueprints licensed by Arm Ltd., will have 192 cores.
The new processors, which are being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. using that company’s 5-nanometer process, are designed to put pressure on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Those companies have dominated the server processor market for decades, but they’re also trying to adapt — and that includes fielding new products with high core counts. Still, James expects to stay in the lead on this trend with AmpereOne.
Fundamentally, she argues, improving performance while keeping power consumption flat is the only way that the chip industry can meet the needs of data center clients. That runs counter to the long-dominant approach: performance at any cost.
Even Ampere’s more energy-sipping designs are thirsty compared to other electronics. The tiny components top out at 350 watts, more than twice as much power as a large flat-screen television would consume. But the company claims that a rack equipped with 36 of its current chips will do the same work as 54 AMD microprocessors or 82 Intel chips.
