Future Intel chips may favor reduced power instead of increased performance

Future Intel chips may favor reduced power instead of increased performance

Moore’s Law has driven innovation in the semiconductor industry for as long as we can remember, and it was practically a given that a new generation of chips would be faster than the last. But if recent comments by William Holt, the head of Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group, are any indication, we might eventually have to tweak our expectations by quite a bit. In the not too distant future, improvements in silicon might be quantified in terms of power consumption above all else.

In comments made this past week at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, Holt acknowledged that the future of semiconductors may rely on technologies that reduce power consumption in exchange for lower absolute performance.

“We’re going to see major transitions. The new technology will be fundamentally different. The best pure technology improvements we can make will bring improvements in power consumption but will reduce speed,” Holt said.

Part of this shift can be attributed to the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, for which power consumption is a primary consideration. Instead of increased performance, discussions today center around issues like battery life, connectivity, and the cloud.

Unfortunately, the technologies required to bring about these reductions in power consumption are a lot slower than those in use today. The idea is that by significantly increasing power efficiency, the decrease in clock speeds can be compensated, for instance by enabling high-density computing systems that are currently restricted by current power consumption levels.

Intel recently announced that it intends to go all out in the IoT arena, but it’s not quite clear what this would mean for its traditional high-end chip business and for users and environments that still demand high-performance CPUs (although its recent purchase of Altera and its FPGA business may provide some indication of where it wants to take its chip operations). But considering that Intel will not be able to just keep increasing clock speeds in a sustainable manner using current technologies, we may very well be in for an era of low-power chips and plodding performance increases.

But with that all said, these changes aren’t going to take place any time within the next few years. All of the new technology that will drastically reduce power consumption will reportedly be introduced only after 2021.

Source: ExtremeTech