Embracing computational variety

Move over Moore’s Law

For decades, general computing power has been increasing exponentially. But demand keeps growing. Compute-hungry machine learning algorithms, big data analytics, and mobile and edge devices are just the latest developments to drive up enterprise requirements for computing power.

The problem? General purpose compute just can’t keep increasing performance to meet this growing demand. Moore’s Law—the observation that computing power doubles every two years or so—has held true for years. But the point at which enhancing CPU performance at the same rate becomes simply uneconomical is fast approaching. Some think it might happen as early as 2021.

So what’s next? As CPU architecture hits its limits, enterprises will increasingly turn to specialized infrastructure to meet their needs for more computational power. Enterprise infrastructure is about to get far more varied.

Everything in its right place: Planning for a heterogeneous future

How will enterprises blend general and special-purpose compute in this next-generation heterogeneous infrastructure environment? By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each processor type–and deploying them where they can add most value:

• CPUs for innovation. The low cost, flexibility, and accessibility of CPUs will ensure they remain a foundation of enterprise architectures for years to come, making them the best choice for core computing requirements and early-stage enterprise innovation.
• Accelerators for optimization. As concepts, devices, and methods are refined and improved, optimization becomes more important than flexibility. This is where purpose-built accelerators like GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs become key, trading flexibility to focus on optimizing specific problems, from throughput to latency to power consumption.
• Emerging compute for revolution. Emerging accelerators like quantum and bio-inspired computing will fundamentally change computation, enabling enterprises to solve previously intractable problems such as truly in-silico drug design or real-time adaptive logistic routing.

Making the jump to computational variety

It’s time to prepare for the coming era of heterogenous computing infrastructure. Here are some recommendations to guide enterprises’ thinking as they plan for the addition of ever more specialized hardware:

1. Revisit existing algorithms. Enterprises should be reassessing existing assumptions about the speed and memory cost of communicating with specialized hardware and should be looking to rethink siloed processing decisions that under-utilize accelerators.
2. Accelerate frictionless computation. Early movers should identify specific enterprise problems which could benefit from using accelerators, creating reusable application-specific implementations or leveraging accelerator services provided by vendors.
3. Architect for difference. It’s now time to be thinking about the unique requirements of heterogeneous computation when creating or refreshing architectures, including co-locating data-intensive workloads with infrastructure where necessary.
4. Redefine the edge. Data-rich and real-time workloads will often also need to be located closer to the data—that is on devices at the network edge. That means a heterogeneous architecture that can operate with low latencies and low power will be key.

Time to embrace heterogeneity

In recent years, the homogeneity, commoditization, and cost-effectiveness offered by virtual machines and cloud computing have enabled enterprises to solve problems once thought too expensive to address, helping established companies evolve and grow and sparking a host of new digital native organizations.

Now the infrastructure landscape is changing once again. A more heterogeneous computing infrastructure will offer enterprises the opportunity to find revolutionary solutions to some of their most computationally challenging problems.

It’s time to embrace the heterogeneous future and start planning now. There are challenges and obstacles to overcome. But the early movers have an opportunity to capture an outsized share of the business innovation, optimization and even revolution on offer.