HPC Hardware Market to Grow at 13.6% CAGR to 2035

HPC systems, including supercomputers, outclass all other classes of computing in terms of calculation speed by parallelizing processing over many processors. HPC has long been an integral tool across critical industries, from facilitating engineering modeling to predicting the weather. The AI boom has intensified development in the sector, growing the capabilities of hardware technologies, including accelerators, interconnects, and memory, at astounding rates.

The HPC hardware market. Source: IDTechEx

IDTechEx’s report examines the key hardware challenges in HPC, which revolve around processors, memory and storage, advanced packaging, interconnects, and thermal management. GPUs and other AI accelerators grab all the headlines in the processor space, with important trends including the adoption of cores for tensor processing within GPUs and hints of AMD challenging NVIDIA. However, substantial progress has also taken place in the CPU market, with core counts approaching 200 in chips like AMD’s Turin processors and the deployment of integrated heterogeneous systems – GPUs and CPUs integrated into the same package – taking place in the world’s most powerful supercomputers, including the USA’s El Capitan and China’s Tianhe-3.

In the memory space, the adoption of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) has been crucial to the growing capabilities of accelerators, with approximately 95% of accelerators in HPC now employing the technology, but research into next-generation memory technologies such as selector-only memory (SOM), phase change memory (PCRAM) and magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) is being driven by the high energy consumption of today’s memory choices. The quest for high-capacity storage that meets the increasing performance requirements of HPC workloads is seeing the emergence of high-density QLC SSDs at a lower cost-point than typical TLC SSDs available in the market.

Of course, these advances evolve large amounts of heat, so thermal management performance is key. Despite immersion cooling’s strong performance in operational expense and performance, cold plate cooling is expected to remain the technology of choice in most cases as HPC builders seek to reduce the massive capital expenses that come with building these enormous interconnected machines.

For those needing to understand the HPC market, including the above trends and further challenges like the development of storage and the geopolitical dynamics that have affected the growth of this technology, IDTechEx’s new report is a must. At the dawn of the exascale era and in the most fruitful period for AI development yet, the demand for supercomputing is set for rapid expansion. As such, “Hardware for HPC and AI 2025-2035: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts” includes 10-year forecasts not only for the overall HPC hardware market but for key hardware technologies, including CPUs, GPUs, memory including HBM, storage, and server boards. Over 50 profiles of HPC hardware industry players are included. The reader will leave equipped with a wide-ranging, in-depth picture of the present and future of this exciting industry.

How are Innovations in GPU Technology Driving the HPC and AI Markets?

The webinar will include:

• Understanding the current state of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI markets and hardware
• Exploring trends in GPU architecture, technologies, fabrication, and packaging of key HPC players
• Addressing challenges in GPU hardware, including moving to AI-specific processing, improvements to memory bandwidth and latency, and increasing transistor densities
• Discussion into the supercomputer and data center markets, and the influence of international trade on HPC and AI systems

If you are unable to make the date, please register anyway to receive the links to the on-demand recording (available for a limited time) and webinar slides as soon as they are available.