Lowering Trends in Energy per Operation

Over at Datacenter Knowledge, Intel’s Winston Saunders looks at SPECpower data and how extended efforts to increase the efficiency of servers under realistic workload scenarios has resulted in a 40% per year reduction in the energy per operation.

So to summarize, the efficiency of two-socket servers has increased dramatically. The efficiency gains result from the increased performance and energy proportionality of the systems. Transitions in transistor architecture result in large performance gains resulting in a reduction in the time necessary to complete a given workload. Transitions in system architecture also result in performance gains, but in addition lower the power consumption while the operation is being completed. This in some sense “doubles” the efficiency gains expected. This efficiency gain is easily visualized by looking at the time to complete an operation and the power used during that time.

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