The Powers and Players Driving the Next Gen of HPC

IDTechEx’s latest report highlights the expected growth and market challenges of high-performance computing (HPC) hardware. The report covers a growth forecast in the next decade, including interviews with key players across the primary companies that will drive this growth. 

Nvidia and AMD remain some of the biggest names in high-performance computing. Image (modified) used under Adobe Stock license

GPUs, Memory, Packaging, and More

The report analyzes six different HPC hardware classes, including memory, GPUs, and electronics packaging.

HPC systems that perform over a quintillion floating point operations are generally thought to only exist in government research laboratories. They are the ones generating model data for weather forecasts, molecular dynamics, and other large, complex problems with many unknown variables. However, recent advances in private industries are starting to make HPC hardware systems available to more customers than ever before. 

Forecasts in HPC Hardware Advances

The HPC hardware market is expected to reach $581 billion by 2035, representing a CAGR of over 13%. IDTechEx anticipates growth in all six market segments, making HPC hardware more accessible than ever. 

The HPC market shows extensive growth over the next decade. 

GPUs are expected to experience rapid growth, quickly outpacing CPUs in terms of market shares. In fact, IDTechEx forecasts a 6x increase in market demand for GPUs—largely in response to the explosion of AI platforms. AI calculations can be more readily conducted on a GPU. 

Leading the GPU race is Nvidia, though there are some indications that AMD may muscle into this market as well. These GPU companies and others are evaluating increasing core count and tensor calculations to win the speed race.  

Expected growth of CPU and GPU markets. 

Other areas of focus include faster solid-state hard drives (SSDs) with higher capacity than ever before. Numerous facilities are developing high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to more efficiently offload data from the processor while making the data more accessible than traditional RAM packages. 

Challenges in HPC Development

Thermal management has always been a large stumbling block for hardware advances. With each new generation of smaller transistors, the problem of dissipating heat increases. With the laws of physics butting against Moore’s law, the report predicts future advances in electronics packaging and thermal management.

Specifically, the document discusses cold plate cooling, which is quickly outpacing immersion cooling for dissipating large quantities of heat. This is because cold plate cooling is easier to scale up and features simpler interconnections between devices. 

For More Information

IDTechEx’s report contains a much more detailed analysis of the markets, challenges, and potential developments in HPC over the next ten years. To view a copy of the report, visit IDTechEx.

Graphs used courtesy of IDTechEx.