Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Speaker:
Pejman Lotfi‑Kamran
Abstract:
The rapid growth of datacenters has led to a significant increase in global electricity consumption, raising important questions about how future server processors should be designed. Although artificial intelligence contributes to this trend, most online services still rely on general purpose processors, making their efficiency critically important. This talk examines how key processor design choices, including operating frequency, core complexity, and cooling technology, influence both performance and energy use for workloads with service level objectives (SLOs). Our results show that processors do not need to run at the very high frequencies used today to meet the performance requirements and SLOs of modern services. Operating at lower frequencies can enable designs that are far more efficient. We also demonstrate that simpler processor cores can be competitive with more complex designs when supported by appropriate hardware mechanisms. Finally, we show that cooling methods strongly affect how processors should be operated, revealing new opportunities for building servers that are both more powerful and significantly more energy efficient.
Speaker:
Pejman Lotfi‑Kamran
Abstract:
The rapid growth of datacenters has led to a significant increase in global electricity consumption, raising important questions about how future server processors should be designed. Although artificial intelligence contributes to this trend, most online services still rely on general purpose processors, making their efficiency critically important. This talk examines how key processor design choices, including operating frequency, core complexity, and cooling technology, influence both performance and energy use for workloads with service level objectives (SLOs). Our results show that processors do not need to run at the very high frequencies used today to meet the performance requirements and SLOs of modern services. Operating at lower frequencies can enable designs that are far more efficient. We also demonstrate that simpler processor cores can be competitive with more complex designs when supported by appropriate hardware mechanisms. Finally, we show that cooling methods strongly affect how processors should be operated, revealing new opportunities for building servers that are both more powerful and significantly more energy efficient.
