More Performance, Less Power
There are nearly 230,000 datacenters worldwide containing 14 million server racks. Since 2013, operational floor space has more than doubled.1 Datacenter workloads and internet traffic, meanwhile, grew by 8x and 12x respectively in the past decade.
What hasn't grown is energy use. Datacenter power usage rose by only 6 percent from 2010 to 2018 and currently represents 1-2% of global consumption.2
Datacenters are also helping other industries to decarbonize: the 7% decline in 2020 emissions partly came through replacing travel with videoconferencing.3
But without continued improvement in performance per watt, power consumption will likely rise, increasing cost, emissions, and regulations.
A Sustainable Shift: Hyperscale cloud providers can shift workloads to regions with cleaner, cheaper power while minimizing performance impacts. Above, moving a VM from Sydney to Taiwan cuts carbon from 6 to 4 grams and cost from 95 to 80 cents while adding only 13 ms to latency. (Source: 451 Research.)
How did power consumption stay flat for a decade? Moore's Law, workload consolidation, and better cooling strategies increased the amount of work performed by datacenters per unit of energy at a regular, rapid cadence.
Unfortunately, many of these techniques are approaching limits. Leading hyperscale datacenters now post Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) ratings below 1.1, meaning little power goes to cooling. Meanwhile, capacity in multi-tenant datacenters is expected to grow by 8% through 20261.
Specialized processing – purpose-built CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, and other specialized processors that optimally allocate workloads – provides a way to continue to increase performance while reducing power usage, emissions, and cost.
A Cleaner Cloud. Servers based on Arm Neoverse can perform 33% to 64% more work (SPECint® 2017) while avoiding 42% to 74% percent of the CO2 emissions of servers using equivalent traditional processors.4 Deployed broadly, Neoverse could increase cloud capacity by 25% or more by 2030 without increasing energy consumption.5
Cloudflare’s mission is to build a better internet—one that's safe, performant, reliable, and that also consumes less energy.
Over 25 million internet properties run on Cloudflare's global network, which spans more than 250 cities in over 100 countries.
Cloudflare recently started to deploy its 11th generation servers across its network and will use Arm-based CPUs designed by Ampere Computing to power them.
Compared to its 10th generation servers based on traditional CPU architectures, the Arm-based servers process an incredible 57% more internet requests per watt.
Cloudflare customers benefit as well: any internet property on Cloudflare’s network will automatically reduce emissions and seamlessly contribute to a greener, more sustainable world.
Cloudflare Nitin Rao discusses how Cloudflare is deploying Arm Neoverse in it's 11th generation of servers.
Innovative chips and systems from Arm partners are reducing carbon emissions while achieving unprecedented levels of performance.
Created by RIKEN and Fujitsu and containing nearly 8 million Arm-based processors, Fugaku is the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It is being used to simulate extreme weather, develop COVID-19 vaccines, and other tasks.
Single-threaded, multicore Central Processing Units (CPUs) optimized for the cloud, such as AWS's Graviton2, have helped customers increase work per watt by 30% or more while simultaneously reducing costs by 20% or more.
Delivering 3x better performance and 4x better performance per watt than its predecessor, Marvell's Octeon 10 Digital Processing Unit, based on Arm Neoverse N2, will bring leading performance to 5G and edge applications.
