Future GPUs (graphics processing units) will be the platform of choice to power exaflop machines and those supercomputers will be able to perform at that level with just 20 MW in 2022, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said at SC11,

The rise of high-performance computing using GPUS has come about because traditional CPUs (central processing units) have become rather inefficient at compute- and data-intensive computation, he said. GPUs, by contrast, are designed to reduce data movement, and although they have poor single threaded performance because of their simple processing engines, there are many more of them to do the work in parallel. That makes for more efficient computation, assuming the application can be molded into the GPU computing model.

NVIDIA’s “Maxwell” GPU generation, scheduled to make its appearance in the middle of the decade, is slated to be the first NVIDIA platform to integrate their upcoming “Project Denver” ARM CPU, a design that will become the basis for all of the company’s product lines. From then on, it’s safe to assume that integration will just get tighter. By 2022, it may not make much sense to even refer to these heterogeneous processors as GPUs anymore, Huang suggested.