Tom Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, speaking at the virtual Global Technology Conference 2020 China, outlined three megatrends that are essential to accelerating the world’s digital future: frictionless networking, pervasive deployment of virtualization (think Zoom with holograms), and AI everywhere. He also pointed to a gigantic hurdle that will need to be overcome: the energy consumption of electronics.
“It’s amazing to see not only how pervasive and resilient the digital infrastructure had become over the last decade and yet how little of its full potential was exploited until COVID-19,” Caulfield said. He predicts not only a post-pandemic new normal but a better normal. “This better normal will come from exploiting the capabilities of our pervasive, expanding and improving digital infrastructure,” he said.
Key to this will be frictionless networking: a seamless, intelligent and secure connection that is always on and ubiquitous. “As you traverse through the world from your home to your office, to restaurants, through airports, you’re always connected. To do this, all devices are enabled with a virtual security guard and a digital assistant,” he explained.
The security guard works in the background to ensure a safe connection. “You never waste a moment of your time searching for a connection, typing in passwords, authentication keys. It’s all automatic,” he said. The ultimate digital assistant goes well beyond Siri or Alexa “This is the real deal. This assistant is with you constantly, not only to answer questions, but to anticipate needs,” Caulfield said.
To make this possible, the key enabling features of our frictionless networks are low power connectivity, security enabled through on-chip embedded non-volatile memory and universal standards on network protocols.
The second mega trend is pervasive deployment of virtualization. Caulfield held up Network Function Virtualization as an example where network processing is done in the cloud and data is transported from dumb access points to the cloud for processing. This is. “NFV significantly improves bandwidth and speed, and it does it at a much lower cost and power point,” he said.
Another use case for virtualization is to take on the human dimension. “We will have digital twins for holographic presence. Zoom, Google Meet and WebEx type meetings have certainly saved the day during COVID-19, but now that we’ve done it seven days a week, 12 hours a day, I think we can all agree that personal virtualization would enhance the interactive engagement experience orders of magnitude.”
To do this personal virtualization or holographic telepresence, data rates will need to be greater than 500 gigabits per second. For even a small hologram, the latencies in the five to 10 millisecond range. “This is a significant uplift from where we are today,” he said. “The key enabling technologies for pervasive deployment of virtualization are a high-speed backbone for compute storage connectivity, AI based data compression and low latency, high reliability, 3D localization.”
AI’s ability to quickly process vast amounts of unstructured data will also accelerate the digital future. “We will need data compression capabilities on the order of 100,000 times more efficient — roughly the bio-inspired estimate for how the human brain works,” Caulfield said. In addition to data parsing and compression, hierarchal AI will need new and novel compute architectures, such as neuromorphic or systolic computing.
The major hurdle to all of the above? “We don’t generate enough electricity on the planet to do all the compute we will need to do to realize our digital transformation journey,” Caulfield said. “Our industry needs to adapt innovative solutions so we can address the acceleration of power consumption and flatten the energy consumption curve.”
A better normal? That sounds good to me! I hope everyone has a safe, healthy and happy holiday season.