> we need to increase the amount of watts we consume per chip.
Not sure we need that, except in niches. At scale you often want at least some efficiency, which is certainly not max TDP per core (because the best efficiency point is with lower frequencies and higher width, not the max freq you can achieve). So remains the question of large number of cores, but at some point the area of silicon also goes stupid high. And you can put multiple packages, without sacrificing overall system density too much, and without departing from simpler, and probably lower TCO pollution.
For small systems it depends, but you actually often have even more limited thermal budget, except again in niches if you are ready to tolerate the drawbacks (stupid power req it even becomes hard to have just a few machines on a basic electrical network in standard homes or offices, high noise under load, obviously high TDP so heating up a lot). But you have less space constraints so if you really want absurd systems you already can.
So do we really need to e.g. double or triple the (electrical/thermal) power density at scale? Do we need 2 kW chips? Do we need to sacrifice the efficiency now, and increase the nominal consumption now, instead of waiting just a few years for node improvements? (And I could even ask: do we really need that much increase of processing power, shouldn't we start to optimise for the total ecological cost instead? and I've not tried to do some prospective in that area but maybe this would mean slowing down the processing power growth...)
>So do we really need to e.g. double or triple the (electrical/thermal) power density at scale?
Will we ever be able to double or triple our (general purpose) compute per cpu any other way? Moore's law is essentially over. Node improvements aren't really happening outside of TSMC, which doesn't have enough manufacturing ability to supply everyone, and even then those node improvements are getting more and more incremental.
And regarding power consumption, I think we really need to be consuming more energy across most sectors of human activity. The most likely explanation for the "great stagnation" is that our energy consumption has basically flatlined since the 70s. It appears that on a civilizational scale, reaching greater levels of development and expression simply requires more Joules. If you disagree, I highly recommend the book Where is my Flying Car?
since the 70s, lights have gotten about 6x more energy efficient, boats and planes are about 2x, and computers are incomparibly more efficient. also, it's pretty clear that before we significantly increase energy consumption, we need to be able to do so without wrecking the environment. massive flooding in major cities and huge refuge crises from desertification are not conducive to progress.
Yet to be clear the total world energy consumption for computers has increased, which is sad because we could certainly cope with 1/2 of the current total speed capacity but way more efficiency. Trying to get very high TDP chips and/or density is likely going in the other direction (but I could be wrong for the datacenter).
Carbon capture is extremely energy intensive and will never work without significantly increasing our energy production. The only way out of the climate crisis is to massively increase, not decrease, the amount of energy available to us
Given that solar and wind are by far the cheapest type of carbon neutral power to deploy and they are already being deployed really quickly, how do you propose doing that?
Ideally, fossil fuels should be used in the near term to bootstrap fission and fusion. Needless to say, this would only be possible with complete destruction of the NRC and other entrenched anti-nuclear forces, so it won't happen of course. Note that fission alone is sufficient to supply our current energy needs for any forseeable amount of time.[0] However, getting back on the Henry Adams curve will eventually require moving beyond fission and creating a Dyson swarm. This Dyson swarm can then be used to bootstrap the Caplan engine[1] which slowly disassembles the sun (interestingly, this actually prolongs the sun's lifespan) and uses its matter for a more efficient form of fusion, compared to the wasteful main sequence nuclear process.
Not sure we need that, except in niches. At scale you often want at least some efficiency, which is certainly not max TDP per core (because the best efficiency point is with lower frequencies and higher width, not the max freq you can achieve). So remains the question of large number of cores, but at some point the area of silicon also goes stupid high. And you can put multiple packages, without sacrificing overall system density too much, and without departing from simpler, and probably lower TCO pollution.
For small systems it depends, but you actually often have even more limited thermal budget, except again in niches if you are ready to tolerate the drawbacks (stupid power req it even becomes hard to have just a few machines on a basic electrical network in standard homes or offices, high noise under load, obviously high TDP so heating up a lot). But you have less space constraints so if you really want absurd systems you already can.
So do we really need to e.g. double or triple the (electrical/thermal) power density at scale? Do we need 2 kW chips? Do we need to sacrifice the efficiency now, and increase the nominal consumption now, instead of waiting just a few years for node improvements? (And I could even ask: do we really need that much increase of processing power, shouldn't we start to optimise for the total ecological cost instead? and I've not tried to do some prospective in that area but maybe this would mean slowing down the processing power growth...)