With the rapid development of digital economy, “data” has become a new factor of production and important resource, along with a large number of professional vocabulary and various technical iterations. Among them, the word “computational power” appears frequently. What’s the story behind it?
From the perspective of economic concept, digital economy refers to the economic form in which human beings guide and realize the rapid optimal allocation and regeneration of resources and realize high-quality economic development through the process of identification, selection, filtering, storage and use of big data (digital knowledge and information). Generally speaking, what we call digital economy covers two aspects: Digital industrialization and industrial digitization.
“Digital industrialization” mainly focuses on the industrialized application of cutting-edge technologies. The purpose is to promote the gradual transformation of cutting-edge scientific and technological achievements into production factors, and give birth to new business forms and models such as information communication, electronic information manufacturing, software and information technology services, Internet and so on.
The purpose of “industrial digitization” is to use cutting-edge technologies to digitally transform, transform and upgrade traditional industries, promote the production efficiency of traditional industries, and achieve breakthroughs.
In 2016, “digital economy” became an important topic of the G20 meeting for the first time. At the meeting, G20 leaders jointly signed the G20 digital economy development and cooperation initiative, which pointed out the direction for promoting economic recovery and development in the next period. In recent years, the keyword “digital economy” has appeared in national strategies and government reports around the world. By the end of 2020, more than 40 countries and regions in the world have raised the cultivation of digital, networked and intelligent technologies and computing capacity to the level of national (regional) strategy. In other words, the development trend of digital economy is not only a global trend, but also a trend of the times.
In China, the field of “digital economy” has developed rapidly in recent years, especially after 2020. Before 2020, the development of various industries in the field of digital economy will be promoted separately and gradually integrated; After 2020, due to the covid-19 pneumonia epidemic and major changes in China’s international situation, the digital transformation of various industries in China has directly changed from the multiple-choice question of “whether to transfer” to the short answer question of “transfer to not in place”. In the more than one year from 2020 to 2021, we can clearly feel that digital technology continues to expand its territory in various industries and scenarios, and has made great strides in both the iterative development of technology and the introduction of industry standards and specifications. In the 14th five year plan and the outline of long-term goals for 2035, Chapter 15 defines the goal of “creating new advantages of digital economy”; By the end of October 2021, the 19th Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee had collectively studied 34 times, including 5 times related to “digital”, including implementing the national big data strategy, accelerating the construction of Digital China, promoting the healthy development of China’s digital economy and other topics.
“Computing power” was originally mainly a measure of the processing power of the cryptocurrency network, that is, the speed at which the computer calculates the output of the hash function.
The “computing power” in the digital economy is no longer limited to the field of cryptocurrency, but refers to the collection of computing speed, algorithm, data storage capacity, transmission capacity, cloud computing service capacity, infrastructure support and so on. In other words, computing power represents the processing ability of digital information in the current digital society to a certain extent.
In February 2021, Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) jointly with IDC, an international authority, issued the 2020 global computing power index evaluation report (hereinafter referred to as the report). The report is the research result of Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) and IDC after one-year in-depth evaluation of China, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Brazil, Russia and South Africa. It is also the research result of the world’s first computing power index. The report reveals the relationship between economic development and computing power, It also provides a reference for the global digital economy to drive economic development and new infrastructure.
The “computing power index evaluation system” established in the report mainly includes four dimensions: computing power, computing efficiency, infrastructure support and application level, which can provide a more accurate reference for us to understand the term “computing power” in the era of digital economy.
We said at the beginning of the article that in the era of digital economy, data is resources. Just as in the industrial age, people will frantically compete for fossil fuel resources, with the continuous development of the digital economy, people also need to compete for the power of data storage, transmission and processing. By what? By calculation. To exaggerate, whoever has mastered the most advanced computing power will take the initiative in the era of digital economy.
This is the case. According to the report, computing power is closely related to economic growth. For every increase in the computing power index, the digital economy and GDP will grow by 3.3 ‰ and 1.8 ‰ respectively. Among them, when a country’s computing power index reaches more than 40 points, for each point of increase in the index, the pull on GDP growth will increase to 1.5 times; When the computational power index reaches more than 60 points, the pull on GDP will further increase to 2.9 times. “Computing power is becoming the core driving force for the development of the digital economy,” Zhou Zhengang, assistant vice president of IDC China, said in his interpretation of the report. “At a time when the global digital transformation has entered the stage of multiplication and innovation, the sooner we realize the role of computing power in promoting the economy and lay out computing infrastructure, the more we can take the lead in future development.”
At present, we are familiar with Internet companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, byte beating, Dajiang and other leading companies in the financial industry. Although the industries are different, in the final analysis, they are all companies with deep computing power. With the further development of the digital economy, the competition of “computing power” will be carried out more frequently, widely and deeply among countries, industries and enterprises.
For example, friends who don’t pay attention to cars may not know that “computing power” has actually become an important indicator for the automotive industry to improve customer experience. In 2019, Tesla took the lead in launching hw3 0 chip, which claims that its 144top computing power has the ability to realize automatic driving at a higher safety level than humans, and made enough traffic at that time. Then, immediately after that, other manufacturers also launched the big computing power platform, and the automotive industry began a vigorous computing power competition. Up to now, we can see that even if there are frequent “accidents” news of automatic driving due to immature technology, the computing competition in the automotive industry has not stopped. Under the background of the rapid development of the digital economy, it is impossible to realize who has given up driving in the future.
However, despite the rapid development of China’s current digital economy and “computing power”, we must realize that the hegemonic power of global “computing power” is still the United States, and the country with the largest contribution of “computing power” in the world is also the United States. The United States has the largest number of super large-scale data centers in the world and the highest level of application of emerging technologies. In the past few years, the rapidly growing demand of super large-scale Internet and cloud service providers has strongly promoted the development of the computing power market in the United States.
However, it is optimistic that although China is in the second place, especially in terms of calculation efficiency and application, there is a certain gap with the United States, most of China’s indicators are developing faster and better based, and are accelerating to catch up. Of course, during this period, we will inevitably be subject to various obstacles and challenges from the top countries. For example, the extortion and plundering of ZTE, Huawei and tiktok by the United States are still vivid.
But so what? The times are created by people. We should firmly believe that time and potential are still in me!
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Author: Yue Xiaohong
Editor: Han Yueyang
