Mobile & Infrastructure: Efficient sustainable development

OverviewIn a recent blog on Arm Blueprint, Arm CEO Simon Segars wrote:

^{Progress cannot come at the expense of the environment.

To avoid catastrophic climate change, the technology industry must focus on decarbonizing compute – reducing energy consumption and lowering emissions wherever compute happens."}

Simon Segars, CEO, Arm

The majority of respondents agreed: the tech sector should find way to continue to innovate while simultaneously reducing its carbon footprint.
However, while few believed in innovation whatever the cost, CxOs and VPs were most likely to put innovation before reducing their carbon footprint.Meanwhile, 1 in 5 developers felt that the industry should reduce its carbon footprint, even if that means imposing limits on technological progress.

Chris Bergey,
SVP & GM, Arm Client Line of BusinessImproving efficiency to help scale mobileIt’s encouraging that over two-thirds of hardware developers focused on mobile computing believe that the industry must find ways to reduce its carbon footprint while innovating for the future. We need to confront the realities of environmental impact of our industry.Compute performance in smartphones has grown exponentially in recent years, as new iterations of Arm technology enable ever-greater performance within a limited thermal envelope and needs for increased on-time without recharging.It means that smartphones designed and built three or four years ago remain highly capable devices today. The average lifespan of a smartphone will increase from 2.58 years in 2014 to 3.77 years in 2024, according to market research platform Statista.By building the very best devices with the highest possible performance, we can ensure that each device offers the latest apps and services for longer, as more apps and services are added year-on-year.We will still see premium devices launched each year and selling prices remaining strong and even strengthening, and we are already seeing devices being used for longer, passed among families, and resold. But we also need to do more to bridge the digital divide in low-income economies, which have until now relied on feature phones rather than smartphones.

Mohamed Awad, SVP and General Manager, Infrastructure Line of BusinessInnovation should not come at the planet’s cost Achieving more computing performance for every watt of power has long been a key driver for Arm. Datacenter workloads and internet traffic are nearly doubling every two years. We need to improve performance per watt at the same rate or better to keep computing from increasing its carbon footprint.But the benefits of continually improving energy efficiency go even further. Greater performance per watt leads to lower costs for customers and a better total cost of ownership (TCO) for carriers and datacenter owners. Cloudflare, a cloud service firm whose technology sits behind 1/6th of the world’s websites, recently reported that Arm Neoverse allows them to process 57% more requests per watt.It’s encouraging to see that 51% of respondents working on datacenter deployments said the tech sector should find ways to innovate while reducing its carbon footprint. At the same time, 29% of datacenter respondents say they won’t sacrifice innovation for sustainability.My message to them is simple:

You can have both."

Neoverse N2, which is based on the Armv9 architecture, for instance, will provide a 40% uplift over Neoverse N1 while new features such as Scalable Vector Extension version 2 and Memory Tagging Extension. And we predict that by 2030, hyperscalers could increase their compute capacity by 25% at the same power levels by switching to Arm.