Fab Advance Will Cut Cloud Hosting Costs

Mobile, tablet and server processors are getting faster and cheaper to run. In June 2022, Samsung has started mass-producing 3nm chips with 23% better performance than 5nm chips, drawing 45% less power and requiring 16% less space.

Arch rival TSMC (which fabricates chips for AMD, ARM and NVIDIA) had announced plans to launch 3nm mass-production later in 2022.

Significantly reduced power consumption and space reductions will eventually translate into lower cloud hosting costs. Significantly reduced power consumption will cut the cost of electricity needed to power a given workload.

Surface area reductions and reduced cooling requirements allow more processing to be packed into existing data centre footprints.

Once this filters through to new servers used by cloud hosting providers, there are likely to be across the board falls in cloud hosting costs - price reductions for existing services or 'free' upgrades that give you more processing power for the same amount of money. This should make cloud hosting more affordable for firms - with medium-sized, tech-savvy firms likely to benefit most.  

Of course, you don't need to wait for 3nm chips to arrive in order to cut your company's cloud hosting costs. Just give us a call on 020 7847 4510 and we'll see what we can do.

3nm chips arrived in 2022, but 2nm chips are next. They're expected to start mass-production in 2024.

Not just faster and cheaper

The improvements in chip fabrication aren't just a matter of faster speeds and cheaper processing power. They're also good news because they allow energy consumption to be contained while demand for processing grows.

The shift towards net-zero is placing a huge strain on the electricity grid, as transport and heating are electrified, and old gas/coal/nuclear power stations are retired. Advances in semiconductor fabrication by Samsung, TSMC and Intel will help cloud providers deliver growing amounts of processing without equivalant rises in electricity consumption.

Cloud providers aren't likely to be given a choice in the matter. The political toxicity of domestic power blackouts means planning authorities will be ever more willing to veto massive new data centres if they put a strain on the electricity grid.

In Ireland, Amazon's plans for a 350 million euro data centre in Drogheda had to be put on ice when the Irish government insisted that "any new data centre should provide a new, directly linked supply of renewable energy and should not jeopardise... existing climate/renewable energy targets."

Procurement by public bodies and large multinationals is also putting pressure on cloud providers to minimise their carbon emissions, with tender scoring systems awaiting points awarded for green initiatives. The 45% improvement in power efficiency caused by the switch to 3nm chips is therefore extremely welcome.

Some providers, such as ourselves already use green energy to power their cloud hosting platforms. So, power efficiency improvements won't cut carbon emissions directly. But they will free up existing renewable energy capacity for use by domestic customers.

Longer Battery Life

The shift to 3nm will materially improve work laptops. The screen will still consume a lot of power, but battery life should improve significantly.

Many laptop processors will no longer be the poor relation to their desktop cousin as throttling processor speed to protect battery life will no longer be required.

Hybrid workers may be able to hotdesk all day without worrying about finding a power cable - just charging their laptops overnight, like their mobiles.

The cost of a decent laptop should also fall - making it more affordable for even smaller organisations to kit out staff with work-owned work-managed laptops.

This will be great for security. Although zero trust network access services can make bring-your-own-device more secure, security is even better if you combine ZTNA with locked-down devices managed by your IT team.