CarbonSet: A Dataset to Analyze Trends and Benchmark the Sustainability of CPUs and GPUs

TL;DR

CarbonSet is a comprehensive dataset that tracks sustainability and performance metrics of CPUs and GPUs over the past decade, revealing increasing carbon emissions and highlighting the need for more sustainable processor designs.

Contribution

This paper introduces CarbonSet, the first holistic dataset for analyzing the environmental sustainability of processors throughout their lifecycle.

Findings

Carbon emissions of flagship processors increased over 50 times in three years.

Modern processors are not yet sustainably designed.

Power efficiency remains a critical challenge.

Abstract

Over the years, the chip industry has consistently developed high-performance processors to address the increasing demands across diverse applications. However, the rapid expansion of chip production has significantly increased carbon emissions, raising critical concerns about environmental sustainability. While researchers have previously modeled the carbon footprint (CFP) at both system and processor levels, a holistic analysis of sustainability trends encompassing the entire chip lifecycle remains lacking. This paper presents CarbonSet, a comprehensive dataset integrating sustainability and performance metrics for CPUs and GPUs over the past decade. CarbonSet aims to benchmark and assess the design of next-generation processors. Leveraging this dataset, we conducted detailed analysis of flagship processors' sustainability trends over the last decade. This paper further highlights that modern processors are not yet sustainably designed, with total carbon emissions increasing more than 50$\times$ in the past three years due to the surging demand driven by the AI boom. Power efficiency remains a significant concern, while advanced process nodes pose new challenges requiring to effectively amortize the dramatically increased manufacturing carbon emissions.