MENLO PARK, Calif. – Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison says some of his company’s data centers are sitting half-empty because they’ve got more space for computers than they have electricity to run them.
“We can’t expand our data centers in certain places. We can’t add more power to the building,” Ellison said at a Silicon Valley tech event Wednesday. “Our racks are half-full because we’ve exceeded our power envelope in the data center. We’ve got more room, we just don’t have more electrical capacity.”
The solution, Ellison says, is a different class of chip that makes energy efficiency as vital as computing power. He said that’s why Oracle, one of the world’s largest business software companies, is betting on a startup called Ampere – which is designing new categories of microprocessors at the young company’s engineering office in Northwest Portland.
“We pay much less for power when we’re running workloads on Ampere,” said Ellison, who addressed Wednesday’s conference remotely from Florida.
Ampere’s headquarters are in the Bay Area, but it employs more than 250 in Portland. Oracle has invested $850 million in the business, aiming to reduce the semiconductor industry’s reliance on the Intel x86 microprocessor that has long dominated the data center market.
Ampere CEO Renée James convened Wednesday’s event to pitch her startup as a potential solution to data centers’ extreme energy consumption. James, formerly Intel’s president, left that company in 2015 and founded Ampere two years later. She said climate change makes it imperative that the technology industry become more efficient.
“You would never spend the kind of time and effort to build a microprocessor company unless you were actually going to solve something different and new,” James said in an interview. “The problem we’re trying to solve is a global issue with data centers.”
Ampere founder and CEO Renée James. Her company is based in California but James lives near Portland.Mike Rogoway/The Oregonian
Ampere engineered its chips based on designs from Arm Holdings, whose chips run most smartphones. Customers demand phone batteries that last all day, so energy efficiency is always top of mind.
Ampere adapted those designs for the data center in hopes of capitalizing on the same features.
“It’s an architectural choice,” James said. “We make tradeoffs for how we’re going to get performance at a certain power level. You design that in from the beginning.”
Data centers account for roughly 3% of global carbon emissions, by some estimates.
They’re also straining power supplies. In Oregon, Amazon says it hasn’t been able to fully equip its data centers in Morrow County because the local power grid doesn’t have enough electricity to meet its needs. Amazon wants to install fuel cells, fed at least initially by a natural gas pipeline, to generate power on site.
Speakers at Wednesday’s event described an emerging computing ecosystem that is more technologically diverse, relying on chips specialized for a particular niche. Such chips, they argued, can be more efficient than the workhorses the industry has used in the past.
Oracle announced Wednesday that it has adapted its core database software to run on Ampere’s chips in addition to Intel processors. And he indicated Oracle no longer buys any processors from Intel at all, relying instead on chips from Ampere and AMD and high-performance processors from Nvidia.
“We think that this is the future, that the old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the marketplace, is finally reaching its limits,” Ellison said.
Jay Goldberg, a semiconductor consultant at D2D Advisory, said Oracle’s investment in Ampere was born of necessity.
“Oracle needed to do something different to scale in the compete in the cloud, and one of the ways they did that was to go all-in on ARM architecture stuff,” Goldberg said. But he said it’s too soon to know if Ellison’s bet will pay off.
More efficient chips are not just good for the environment – they’re also good for the bottom line, if data center operators pay less for electricity.
Ampere is far from the only chip company making this pitch.
Intel, AMD and many others are touting chips that draw less power and new ways to operate data centers that gulp down less electricity.
That makes it tough for a small company like Ampere to stand out.
“Everybody has a very similar story,” Goldberg said. “Yes, they have lots of advances in power consumption, but so does everybody else.”
— Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | 503-294-7699
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