LOCOS Seminar – Lieven Eeckhout: Sustainable Processor Design
OnlineLieven Eeckhout is a Professor at Ghent University, Belgium, and will deliver a LOCOS Seminar on Sustainable Processor Design.
Sustainability and climate change is a major challenge for our generation. In this talk I will argue that sustainable development requires a holistic approach and involves multi-perspective thinking. Applied to computing, sustainable development means that we need to consider the entire environmental impact of computing, including raw material extraction, component manufacturing, product assembly, transportation, use, repair/maintenance, and end-of-life processing (disassembly and recycling/ reuse). Analyzing current trends reveals that the embodied footprint is, or will soon be, more significant compared to the operational footprint. I will present a simple, yet insightful, first-order model to assess and reason about the sustainability of processors in light of the inherent data uncertainty. Applying the model to a variety of case studies illustrates what computer architects and engineers can and should do to better understand the sustainability impact of computing, and to design sustainable processors.