From ARK Investment Management, Dec. 4:
One of the most widely debated questions in computing today is: what
is the addressable market for accelerators such as GPUs (graphic
processing units), FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), and ASICs
(application-specific integrated circuits)? Today accelerators are used
selectively in servers to speed up workloads such as artificial
intelligence (AI), search, and video transcoding. As Moore’s Law slows
down and AI grows as a proportion of compute load, accelerator
penetration will trend higher. The question is, how much higher?
One way to answer this question is to look at the adoption of accelerators in the high-performance computing (HPC) market. HPC
operates at the high end of the server market in applications like
supercomputing, oil and gas exploration, and molecular biology
simulations. Long before deep learning became fashionable, HPC customers
turned to accelerators to speed up algorithms used in scientific
computing. Today, HPC is a leading indicator of accelerator adoption,
offering insights into potential penetration and market opportunity.
In 2010 the HPC accelerator opportunity began in earnest with the introduction of Nvidia’s Fermi GPU.
Fermi enabled 64-bit floating point operations and error-correcting
code memory (ECC memory), two features critical for scientific
computing. Since then, GPUs have featured prominently in major
facilities including the Summit supercomputer at Oakridge National Labs and the Sierra supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As a result, the share of new computing power enabled by GPUs in the world’s Top 500 supercomputers has increased from 20% in 2010 to 76% in 2018, as shown below.
While accelerators have transformed the HPC market, enterprises and
hyperscale data centers still rely on conventional CPU (central
processing unit) servers. That said, the trends that drove accelerator
adoption in HPC—the slowdown of Moore’s Law and the growth of
compute-intensive workloads such as AI—are going mainstream in data
centers. If the data center market as a whole were to follow in the
footsteps of HPC, accelerators could displace Intel CPUs as the
workhorse of enterprise computing.
If processors were to grow to 50% of total server component costs,
with accelerators capturing 70% of processors, as is the case in the HPC
market today, the market for accelerators could scale from $4 billion today to $24 billion. Currently, the size of the computer server market is $80 billion globally, according to IDC.
If manufacturers take a 15% cut, then $68 billion accrues to component
suppliers such as Intel, Micron, and Nvidia. Today we estimate that
processors account for roughly 35% of server component costs, the
balance allocated to memory, storage, and networking. With HPC and AI, servers are evolving toward higher compute configurations, pushing processors and accelerators to 80% of total component costs....MORE
