Intel have announced a new data centre chip at a semiconductor event hosted at Stanford University in Silicon Valley.
Notably, the new chip will have a 240% better performance per watt than Intel's current generation of data centre chip.
This means the new chip, named Sierra Forest, will be able to more than double the computing work of Intel’s current chips, while using the same amount of power.
The news comes as the data centre industry is desperate to reduce electricity consumption, as computing heavy generative AI is increasing demand for data centre services.
Some studies have suggested that data centre’s will account for 10% of the planets electricity consumption by 2030.
The race to develop energy efficiency technology is both essential and competitive.
Intel has recently lost market share in data centres to rivals Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Ampere, the latter of which was formed by Intel executives and was the first company to market a chip as being able to manage cloud computing in an energy efficient manner.
AMD have followed suit, with a new chip hitting the market in June of this year, that AMD claim has a similar power consumption efficiency boost of 2.7x.
Intel’s Sierra Forest chip meanwhile is scheduled for release in 2024.
The release of Sierra Forest marks a change in how Intel is differentiating the data centre chips it offers.
Splitting them into two categories, Intel customers will be able to chose between the energy efficient Sierra Forest chip or the “Granite Rapids” chip that offers better performance at the cost of higher power consumption.
