Real Efficiency at Scale with Sean Varley

Anne Currie is joined by Sean Varley, Chief Evangelist and VP of Business Development at Ampere Computing, a leader in building energy-efficient, cloud-native processors. They unpack the energy demands of AI, why power caps and utilization matter more than raw compute, and how to rethink metrics like performance-per-rack for a greener digital future. Sean also discusses Ampere’s role in the AI Platform Alliance, the company’s partnership with Rakuten, and how infrastructure choices impact the climate trajectory of AI.

Learn more about our people:

• Anne Currie: LinkedIn | Website
• Sean Varley: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Resources:

• Ampere Cloud Native Processors – Ultra-efficient ARM-based chips powering cloud and edge workloads [02:30]
• AI Platform Alliance – Coalition promoting energy-efficient AI hardware [04:55]
• Ampere + Rakuten Case Study – Real-world deployment with 36% less energy per rack [05:50]
• Green Software Foundation Real Time Cloud Project – Standardizing real-time carbon data from cloud providers [15:10]
• Software Carbon Intensity Specification – Measuring the carbon intensity of software [17:45]
• FinOps Foundation – Financial accountability in cloud usage, with sustainability guidance [24:20]
• Kepler Project – Kubernetes power usage monitoring [26:30]
• LLaMA Models by Meta [29:10]
• Anthropic’s Claude AI [31:25]
• Anne Currie, Sara Bergman & Sarah Hsu: Building Green Software [34:00]

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Sean Varley: Because at the end of the day, if you want to be more sustainable, then just use less electricity. That's the whole point, right.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to the World of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software. So I'm your guest host today. It's not, you're not hearing the usual dulcet tones of Chris Adams. My name is Anne Currie. And today we'll be diving into a pressing and timely topic, how to scale AI infrastructure sustainably in a world where energy constraints are becoming a hard limit. And that means that we are gonna be, have to be a little bit more clever and a little bit more careful when we choose the chips we run on. So it's tempting to believe that innovation alone will lead us towards greener compute, but in reality, real sustainability gains happen when efficiency becomes a business imperative when performance per watt, cost and carbon footprint are all measured and all have weight. So, that's where companies like Ampere come in, with cloud native energy efficient approaches to chip design. They're rethinking how we power the AI boom, not just faster but smarter. It's a strategy that aligns directly with Green Software Foundation's mission to reduce carbon emissions from the software lifecycle, particularly in the cloud. So in this episode, we'll explore what this looks like at scale and what we can learn from Ampere's approach to real world efficiency. So what did it take? What does it take to make an AI ready infrastructure that's both powerful, effective, and sustainable? Let's find out. And today we have with us Sean Varley from Ampere.

So Sean, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sean Varley: Yeah, absolutely Anne, and thanks first for having me on the podcast. I'm a big fan, so, I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I'm the chief evangelist of Ampere Computing. And, I, now what that means is that we run a lot of the ecosystem building and all of the partnership kind of, works that go on to support our silicon products in the marketplace.

And also, build a lot of awareness right around some of these concepts you introduced. You know, all of the, you know, kind of building out that awareness around sustainability and power efficiency and how that also really kinda works, within different workload contexts and workload context change over time.

So all of those sorts of things are kind of in scope, for the evangelism role.

Anne Currie: That's, that is fantastic. So I'll just introduce myself a little bit as well. My name is Anne Currie. If you haven't heard the podcast before, I am one of the authors of O'Reilly's new book, Building Green Software, which I, as I always say, everybody who's listening to this podcast should read Building Green Software.

That was, that is entirely why we wrote the book. I'm also the CEO of the training and Green Consulting Company as Strategically Green. So, hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to talk a little bit about training consultancy, but back to the, back to the podcast. Oh, and I need to remember that everything we'll be talking about today, there will be links about it in the show notes.

So you don't need to worry about writing down URLs or anything. Just look at the show notes before. So, now, I'm actually gonna start off the question by harking, start off the podcast by harking back to somebody that we had on the podcast a couple of months ago. A chap called, Charles Humble. And his, the assertion that he was making was that we all need to wake up to the fact that there isn't just one chip anymore, there isn't a default chip anymore that everybody uses and is kind of good enough for the best in all circumstances to use. when you are, setting up infrastructure, or in the cloud for example, and you have the dropdown that picks witch chip you're going use, the defaults might be Intel, for example. That is no longer a no-brainer, that you just go with the default. There are lots and lots of options, to the extent that, I mean, Ampere is a new chip company that decided to go into the market. So one of the questions that I have is why? You know, what gap did you see that it was worth coming in to fill?

Because 10 years ago we would've said there was no real gap, wouldn't we?

Sean Varley: That's right. Yeah. Actually it was a much more homogenous ecosystem back in those days. You know, and I, full disclosure, I came from Intel. I did a lot of time there. But about seven years, six years ago, I chose to come to Ampere. and part of this was the evolution of the market, right?

The cloud market came in and changed a lot of different things, because there's kind of classically, especially in server computing, there's sort of the enterprise and the cloud and the cloud of course has had a lot of years to grow now. And the way that the cloud has evolved was to, really kind of, you know, push all of the computing

to the top of its performance, the peak performance that you could get out of it. But there, you know, nobody really paid attention to power. Going back, you know, 10, 15, 20 years, nobody cared. And those were in the early days of Moore's law. And, part of what happened with Moore's Law is as frequencies, you know, grew then so did performance, you know, linearly.

And I think that sort of trained into the industry a lot of complacency. And that complacency then became more ossified into the, you know, the way that people architected and what they paid attention to, metrics that they paid attention to when they built chips. But going back about seven, eight years, we actually saw that there was a major opportunity to get equal or better performance for about half the power. And that's kind of what forms some of our interest in building a company like Ampere. Now, of course, Ampere, since its inception has be