No Transistor Left Behind - Raja Koduri, VP, Intel

 

 

Hot Chips is an annual IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Chips usually held in San Francisco, CA, USA in August. This year, due to COVID-19, it was held as a Virtual Conference. Access the Program at the Hot Chips website.

One of the Keynotes was presented by Raja M. Koduri, Senior Vice President, Chief Architect, and General Manager of Architecture, Graphics, and Software at Intel. An overview is available at The Next Platform.

The title was “No Transistor Left Behind,” which presented a review and prospect of the computer industry, focusing on how more efficient usage of transistor resources can bring about major improvement in performance, going far beyond the improvement in the transistors themselves. This will require extensive hardware-software co-design throughout the entire industry.

The talk started with a brief tribute to the late Frances Allen, a pioneering computer scientist who developed some of the first compilers.

Mr. Koduri went on to review past development of computer hardware and software, and implications for the future. Each period was characterized by a dominant set of computer applications. Earlier there was the PC era, followed more recently with the Mobile and Cloud era. We are now entering the Intelligence era, characterized by massive growth of data, which can only be handled by AI systems. The demand for processing is rising exponentially, going up by a factor of 1000 by 2025. This will require both general-purpose and specialized processors, enabling exascale performance that goes beyond supercomputers in data centers. This will require a new contract between hardware and software developers.