Energy-saving chips will become a new battlefield

Image source: Network

According to the South Korean Economic Daily, ESG standards and big data are expected to drive data center operators to move to higher-priced, low-power chips.

Driven by applications such as artificial intelligence, the demand for data processing around the world is growing exponentially. Running servers that store and process data means that data centers consume a lot of energy.

ESG requirements have reportedly forced big global tech companies like Google and Amazon to adopt relatively more expensive renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. To compensate for the soaring cost of renewables and the growth in data volumes, big tech companies are expected to accelerate their shift to energy-efficient, high-performance chips that are becoming a new battleground for chipmakers.

"Big tech companies are willing to pay for low-power chips, even though they are slightly more expensive," a semiconductor industry source said. "If low-power chips become the industry standard, they will become a measure of chipmakers' competitiveness."

Samsung Electronics recently shared an energy-saving solution for a data center: solid-state drives (SSDs) made of NAND flash memory and the latest DDR5 server memory to replace hard disk drives released for data centers in 2020. This will reduce the data center's energy consumption by 7 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, enough to power homes in New York State for four months, the company said.

Hyundai Motor Securities predicted in a recent research report that the global memory chip market will reach $173.2 billion by 2022. This is based on the assumption that the data center memory chip market will grow by 8% year-on-year, driven by high-performance demand and energy-efficient chips.

SK Hynix, the world's second-largest manufacturer of memory chips, is looking to high-bandwidth memory 3 (HBM3) used in high-performance data centers. Its latest DRAM, released in October, reduces energy consumption by about 50 percent.

Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) DRAM is another high-performance chip. Mass production is scheduled for Next February, when Intel will launch a CPU equipped with DDR5 DRAM. Compared to the previous generation of DDR4, the DDR5 chip increases data speed by approximately 30% while reducing power consumption by 25%.

According to data from the International Energy Agency on December 19, global data center electricity consumption will reach 200-250 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2020, accounting for about 1% of global final electricity demand. This year, with the rise of contactless services, electricity consumption is expected to increase dramatically.

According to market tracker IDC IGIS, as of 2018, the cumulative amount of digital data reached 33 zettabytes (ZB), or 33 trillion gigabytes. Over the next four years, it is expected that 175 ZB of global digital data will be created annually by 2025. (Proofreading | Value）