Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, told Interop attendees that infrastructure and server costs need to come down more and that people are worried about power, security manageability and lock-in issues. “We would need 45 new nuclear power plants to power the next billion at current power usage levels,” Skaugen said.
Costs are coming down for compute power and will continue to do so. According to Skaugen, in 1997 a teraflop of compute cost 55 thousand dollars. In 2010, 500 teraflops can be had for less than $100 per gigaflop.
“The next ten years is about open switching and routing has been too expensive,” Skaugen said. “We can accelerate that and put the same economics for networking too.”
Intel is now moving to a 3D transistor model which consumes half the power on a 22 nanometer process. “This will transform everything from phones all the way up to the highest performing supercomputers,” Skaugen said.