Embodied Emissions of 2.5D and 3D Scaling in Chipletized GPUs for Low-Carbon AI

Overview & Synopsis

GPU compute resources are scaling to support growing AI workloads, leading to further rises in the climate change impact of hyperscale data centers that rely on high-performance GPUs. To model how packaging decisions impact the carbon footprint we have estimated the embodied emissions (EE) of a chiplet-based GPU that has been scaled in 2.5D and 3D using the imec.netzero modelling platform. We doubled the number of compute units and high bandwidth memory (HBM) capacity in the 2.5D and 3D scaled systems and found that 3D scaling results in an 89% increase in EE, as compared to an increase of 141% for 2.5D scaling, positioning 3D scaling as an attractive solution to limit the embodied emissions due to GPU scaling.