The Power of Ecosystem Collaboration to Reach
Sustainability Goals
Intel has a long-standing commitment to corporate responsibility and sustainability including our more recent goal to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in our global operations—otherwise known as Scope 1 and 2 emissions—by 2040. As one of the world’s leading semiconductor design and manufacturing companies, we are uniquely positioned to drive sustainability across the globe, both through our own actions and through the breadth of our customer base, ecosystem partners, and cooperative innovation.
The steadfast focus of ecosystem partnerships is elemental to obtaining the necessary results. Our customers need us to combine forces by seizing and investing in sustainable technology advancements to deliver meaningful solutions. At Intel, we are extending our sustainability efforts to drive three key focus areas to realize net-zero greenhouse gas emissions independently and in support of the solution development supply chain.
First, we’re executing against a plan to reduce emissions across manufacturing operations and our office buildings. This plan includes investing in renewable electricity: at the end of 2022, our global renewable electricity usage is 93%1, up from 80% in 2021. Second, we’re collaborating with the industry and academia to develop semiconductor processing alternatives and energy efficiencies across the value chain and to establish standard reporting metrics. Third, we are increasing energy efficiency and lowering the total carbon footprint of our products and platforms, which helps our customers achieve their sustainability goals. For instance, data center operators could see up to a 60% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and power using 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors2.
Driving action towards achieving the ambitious targets set to address climate change within the network and at the edge requires focused innovation from the Telco industry. In 2022, the rising cost and availability of energy became a major concern, and in parallel, the communications industry is grappling with the growth of mobile traffic--expected to grow by a factor of nearly 4 in 2028 --due to 5G, private networks and edge infrastructure. As an example, in Telco, the power bill represents 20-40%4 of total network operating expenses and is a major contributor to emissions. It is imperative that we find ways to optimize the energy efficiency of our network infrastructure and devices, because the potential impact is huge.
Intel recently announced several power-efficient products and demonstrated solutions that showcase how we’re enabling customers to leverage telemetry and real-time power management technologies to achieve energy efficiency while meeting network and edge SLAs. For example, 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors provide unmatched capabilities for a cloud-native 5G mobile core including the industry’s first 1 Tbps. of performance for the 5G UPF workload with a single dual socket server5. Intel® Infrastructure Power Manager for 5G Core software delivers an average power savings of 30% power6. Customers no longer have to choose between performance and power savings – they can achieve both.
For a Mobile Network Operator, the RAN consumes a significant portion of the energy. Intel® vRAN Boost fully integrates vRAN acceleration into the 4th Gen Intel Xeon, eliminating the need for an external accelerator card. This architectural innovation results in an incremental compute power savings of approximately 20%7 above and beyond the 4th Gen Intel Xeon platform’s already outstanding performance-per-watt gain, enabling a further decrease in energy consumption. Intel is collaborating with customers and industry partners to absorb this value to create RAN solutions that meet the need for exponentially more computing processing power, while running more efficiently and using less energy.
One example of RAN collaboration is the Ericsson-Intel Tech Hub, announced in May of 2022 to enable both companies to pool R&D toward creating high-performing Cloud RAN solutions. The Tech Hub focuses on the benefits that Ericsson Cloud RAN and Intel technology can bring to improving energy efficiency and network performance. Through the companies’ collaborative efforts, Ericsson Cloud RAN, a cloud-native software solution handling compute functionality in the RAN, can save power using C-state power management features built into the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with Intel® vRAN Boost without compromising quality or performance.
At MWC 2023, Ericsson demonstrated average energy efficiency improvements of up to 20% during quiet periods and up to 10% during busy periods through dynamic power management using C-states while meeting all KPIs even during abrupt changes in traffic load.8 Ericsson has expanded its efforts with an additional ecosystem partner, Red Hat, further enabling communication service providers to onboard, deploy and realize these benefits.
Red Hat strives to instrument our platforms to help our customers and partners build the foundation of their power consumption roadmap as part of our commitment to environmental sustainability. As a leader in open source technologies, Red Hat is working with upstream communities like the Kepler project and the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group to develop new technologies and methodologies to assess and monitor the power consumption of Red Hat Openshift or Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the workloads running on top of them.
The Ericsson Cloud RAN offering runs on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, and leverages Intel technologies to deliver excellent performance per-watt to address today’s industry requirements. Attendees of the Red Hat Summit 2023 can learn more by attending the May 24th keynote at 9:00 AM ET hosted by Chris Wright, chief technology officer, Red Hat, who will be joined by Eric Parsons of Ericsson and me. There is also an opportunity to experience the solution while engaging subject matter experts at the Intel booth.
Collaboration is the key to realizing the era of sustainable computing. This is a priority for Intel, and we are using our unique market position and capability to connect compute ecosystems to directly engage with customers and industry peers – across OEM/ODMs, cloud service providers, industry, and policymakers, and more – to drive emissions reductions and promote industry-wide improvements in sustainability indicators. We’ve made incredible strides and will continue to invest in technology advancement and partnership to reach sustainability goals.
Reference Info:
- Intel 2022-23 Corporate Responsibility Report
- Calculations as of March 28, 2023 based on the Intel® Node TCO & Power Calculator using default cost, power and TCO assumptions over a 5-year TCO horizon comparing replacing 50 older servers with Intel Xeon 4110 processors with new servers using new Intel Xeon 5420+ processors. Performance measurements based on published SPECrate®2017_int_base on spec.org as of March 28, 2023. Results may vary. Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex
- Ericsson Mobility Report – November 2022 Page 22
- “Journey Towards Net Zero Mobile Network,” Strategy Analytics, February 2022
- Tested by Intel as of 01/27/23. 1-node, 2x Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8470N CPU, 52 cores(104 Total), HT On, Turbo Off, Total Memory 1024GB (16x64GB DDR5 4800 MT/s [4800 MT/s]), BIOS EGSDCRB1.SYS.0093.D22.2211170057, microcode 0x2b000130, 6x Intel E810-2CQDA2 (CVL, Chapman Beach, Total – 6x100G ports), 1x Intel E810-CQDA2 (CVL, Tacoma Rapids, Total – 2x100G ports) 1x 447.1G INTEL SSDSCKKB8 , 1x 931.5G CT1000MX500SSD1, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 5.15.0-53-generic, UPF(GCC 9.4.0/Clang9.0.0,DPDK 22.07,VPP 20.09). See also 5G Core Performance and Power Savings - Fact Sheet Results may vary. Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex
- Tested by Intel as of 01/26/23. 1-node, 2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6438N CPU, 32 cores, HT On, Turbo Off, Total Memory 512GB (16x32GB DDR5 4800 MT/s [4000 MT/s]), BIOS EGSDCRB1.SYS.0090.D03.2210040200, microcode 0x2b0000c0, 2x Intel E810-2CQDA2 (CVL, Chapman Beach, Total – 4x100G ports), 1x 223.6G INTEL SSDSC2KB240G8, 1x 745.2G INTEL SSDSC2BA800G3, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 5.15.0-27-generic, GCC 7.5.0, DPDK 22.11. See also Intel Newsroom - Intel Accelerates 5G Leadership with New Products Results may vary. Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex
- Estimated as of 12/06/2022 based on scenario design power (SDP) analysis on pre-production 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with Intel® vRAN Boost and pre-production 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with external 5G accelerator card, at same core count and frequency. See also 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with Intel vRAN Boost - Fact Sheet Performance and power varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex.
- Information provided courtesy of Ericsson. Please consult Ericsson for additional information. The power saving is L1 only and does not include full server or end to end system.
Notices & Disclaimers
Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configuration and may not reflect all publicly available updates. Results have been estimated or simulated. See backup for configuration details. No product or component can be absolutely secure.
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