Intel announced Application Energy Telemetry at Computex in a continuing bid to help data centers lower energy usage.
AET was first introduced with Intel Xeon 6+ processors (codenamed Clearwater Forest) on March 3, and Intel chose Computex to expand on its merits.
Intel said the AET solution will be used across future processors, including Diamond Rapids. The Xeon 6+ processors were the first data center CPUs manufactured on the company’s 18A (1.8nm) process. They feature up to 288 cores.
Primarily, AET is a means for data centers to gain visibility into CPU workloads and their energy usage. Intel said it will help infrastructure and software teams gain more granular visibility into CPU energy and activity metrics associated with various workloads. In turn, these insights will enable informed, energy-aware operational decisions.
The purpose of AET is to allow data center managers see exactly how much electricity a single software application or client VM is consuming. This will help guide decisions about power management, software optimization and ways to reduce a company’s overall carbon footprint.
The key audiences for AET are data centers, but also cloud and hyperscale providers, telco and network operators and more.
Intel compared AET with software-based systems for power estimations, noting that AET is hardware-based with direct measurements done in silicon. It is designed for large-scale and dynamic systems.
As for competitors, AMD makes a telemetry interface in its processors called Running Average Power Limit, allowing teams to track CPU, RAM and SoC energy metrics per-application or thread with open-source tools. Nvidia’s Data Center Manager is intended for heavy AI and GPU workloads and tracks GPU energy consumption, thermal metrics and application power profiles down to an individual process.
“Power is definitely a concern for datacenters as its one of the barriers to building out more capacity,” said Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. “It's not the dominant issue, though, so while all processor companies say they are reducing power requirements--and that’s important--so is processing capability.
“But certainly anything that can be done to save power, especially as you deploy hundreds of thousands of chips, is a big deal both for design of datacenters as well as cost to run them. Power is not free.”
Schwarz Digits, based in Germany, is already using Intel Xeon 6+ with the AET “to give real-time, low-overhead insight into workload energy behavior,” said Matthias Sutter, chief product owner at Schwarz Digits in a statement. “Our goal is to optimize placement, balance power and reduce total cost of ownership across the fleet.”