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Duncan, a PhD candidate in the 听will be based at Intel鈥檚 Data Center Cloud Platform Group in Hillsboro, USA.

鈥淒ata centres are avid consumers of power and if allowed to continue to expand in their current form could become a major consumer of the world鈥檚 energy supply,鈥� says Duncan, who will join Intel鈥檚 world-leading team investigating better methods for using new chips to be released in 2017 which combine CPUs (Central Processing Unit) and FPGAs (field-programmable gate array).

鈥淔PGAs are specialty chips used to speed up certain kinds of computer workloads such as machine learning,鈥� explains Duncan. 听 听

鈥淭he FPGA chip has also been around for a while but is difficult to work with, however Intel鈥檚 new technology will make it mainstream.

鈥淚t鈥檚 like being given two buckets of Lego blocks.听 The CPU bucket only has one type of Lego block so it can only be made into one thing, but the FPGA bucket has all kinds of blocks 鈥� small, large, rectangle or square 鈥� an assortment that can be changed into any desired configuration.

鈥淲e can change the FPGA part to suit our needs but the CPU can鈥檛 be altered. Also FPGAs are far more energy efficient than CPUs on a performance-per-watt basis.鈥�

Duncan, who was fourteen when he built his first computer from off-the-shelve components, says: 鈥淭his is an amazing opportunity for me. The particular FPGA algorithm that I will be able to develop will allow data centres to run with less power but just as efficiently.鈥澨�

, Duncan鈥檚 Ph.D. supervisor says: 鈥淕reenpeace noted that if the Cloud were a country, it would have the fifth largest electricity demand in the world. Duncan鈥檚 work is extremely timely as it will utilise Intel鈥檚 technology to dramatically improve the speed and power consumption of these data centres.鈥�

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