Advanced data analytics technologies are forecast to add trillions to the economy, but doing so will require new approaches, innovation

“Data lives, and its impact on each of our lives over the years ahead is going to be astounding,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of Micron Technology. “We are absolutely living in a transformative age.”

Mehrotra made the comments as he opened his keynote address at COMPUTEX, the leading information and communications technology trade show organized by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) which is this year being held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The world’s economy is now based on data and driven by related technologies. Mehrotra cited a forecast that advanced data analytics technologies would add US$13 trillion to the global economy by 2030. For Micron Technology, the world’s fourth-largest semiconductor company and a powerhouse in memory chips, such an outlook presents a literal world of opportunities.

The massive, projected added value is driven by the ability to make faster and better decisions based on available data, but capitalizing on new opportunities will require new computing approaches and platform innovation to adapt to changes in data-intensive computing. Two trends driving this change are artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G, which are supporting growth in each other.

At a COMPUTEX Forum session later in the afternoon, Raj Hazra, senior vice president and general manager of Micron Technology’s compute and networking business unit, cited a forecast that 90 percent of enterprise applications will feature embedded AI by 2025.

Possible uses include conversation interfaces and dealing with multiple sources of data to train and make predictions, he said, adding that to continue enabling such progress, memory is changing to meet the need for infrastructure to keep up with the promise of AI.

Meanwhile, 5G’s high-bandwidth capabilities and multitude of connections will enable “an intelligent infrastructure on the edge of our networks … giving us access to data in real time; data that we simply aren’t able to make use of today,” Mehrotra said.

Mehrotra touted Micron Technology’s validation of its 1-alpha DRAM process — whose low-power variant reduces power consumption by up to 20 percent — making it available to even end users. However, he pivoted to the future with DDR5, saying that its specification was drafted with a focus on data center requirements to enable the capabilities of the future.

Perhaps even more exciting is Compute Express Link (CXL), an open standard interconnection designed to improve far memory performance, which in turn would relieve the CPU bottleneck and accelerate data center performance.

Collaboration is a requirement for unleashing the full potential of all these new technologies. In that vein, Mehrotra invited a number of top executives from some of Micron Technology’s many partners: Acer CEO Jason Chen, AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster, BMW senior vice president Carsten Regent and Qualcomm senior vice president Nakul Duggal.