Green Computing

I'll be curious to see if there turns out to be a parallel between what
is happening now in the auto industry, and what happens in the future
in the computing industry.  



We recently passed the 25th anniversary of the original IBM PC ( href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_intro.html">model
5150).  Ever since then, computer marketing has been
oriented toward progressively faster, more capable machines.  


i-cfc5911b9652042c14847449742c02e9-ibm-pc-5150.jpg

Original IBM PC

photo from IBM archive



But now, we hear that rel="tag">Intel is href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/11/37NNintellayoffs_1.html">planning
more layoffs.  The upcoming mass-market introduction
of Windows Vista might help, but mostly people will need more RAM and a
better video card, not a whole new machine.  And given the
glacial pace of Windows development, it will be a long time before
there is another upgrade cycle.  



Media center PCs will be another growth area.  But with those,
mostly what you need is a lot of I/O capability and a lot of storage.
 



There is an urban legend about a sales presentation given at the
roll-out of IBM successor machine, the AT (with a 6 MHz 30286
processor) .  It is said that the sales rep promoted it as a
special-purpose device.  After all, it was capable of
multi-processing, and could access 16MB of RAM.  It's said
that he stated: "nobody needs this much power on their desktop."



The fact is, a lot people have all the computing power they need.
 At this point in the industry, it may be time to focus on
attributes other than raw power.


i-d87afe2e385e2e460b6a3e2f5bedbb1c-eniac-panel.jpg

panel from the original href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eniac">ENIAC

photo by: j7uy5



The fact is, a lot people have all the computing power they need.
 At this point in the industry, it may be time to focus on
attributes other than raw power.  


i-ee5ff04d4bd3d02a90ea5d8b4fe9e3ab-via_treemark.jpg



href="http://www.via.com.tw/en/index.jsp" rel="tag">Via
Technologies created an artificial " href="http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/cleancomputing/treemark_rating.jsp"
rel="tag">TreeMark™" benchmark ( href="http://www.linuxdevices.com/files/misc/via_treemark_methodology.gif"
target="new">methodology chart here)
aimed at calculating the total number of trees needed to
sequester the carbon released as a result of the chip's expected
lifetime operation. The chart below compares the C7-D to
processors from competitors.



The original
article
is on LinuxDevices.com.  VIA's press release
is href="http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7-d/index.jsp">here.
 The VIA C7-D runs at either 1.5 or 1.8 gigahertz; at 1.8, is
uses just 20 watts.  Another VIA model uses just 7.5 watts --
about as much as a night light.  Modern CPU chips run at about
85 watts.  



If you need more power, AMD will have a 35-watt dual-core Athlon64 X2
3800+ model by the end of the year.  



Note that the VIA chips will also include their " href="http://www.via.com.tw/en/resources/pressroom/2004_archive/pr040910_padlock-sdk.jsp">Security
Suite." That is a portion of the chip that is dedicated to href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator"
rel="tag">(pseudo)random number generation, as
well as href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard">AES
encryption/decryption.  In my interpretation, this
suggests that VIA is planning to develop mobile business devices, in
which low cost and high security would be important.  



The main point here is that there may be a divergence in the industry,
with home/small office computing becoming more focused on low energy
consumption.  That also makes for quieter machines, a plus in
many environments.  I'd hate to see some of our leading
industries get caught by a change in consumer needs.
 Especially if the environment could be helped by a little
foresight.  


Categories

More like this

We all had some laughs when the two-bladed razor was improved with the addition of a third blade.  Late-night comedians joked about razors coming with four or even five blades. Then, we all had a few more chuckles when the four-bladed Schick Quattro actually made it to market, soon followed by the…
Almost every resource on the Internet on building your own computer is oriented towards building a gaming computer. The second most common discussion is how to build a "budget PC." When I sought out the latest information on building a computer a few weeks ago, I did not like either of these two…
Designed and built by IBM, at a cost of some $130 million, Roadrunner is the world's fastest supercomputer. It contains 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i central processing units, 6,480 AMD dual-core processors, and occupies nearly 6,000 square feet at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico…
This is a href="http://www.digitimes.com/displays/a20070404PD212.html">pico-projector from Texas Instruments.  The idea is to have a device that can project an image onto a screen, using a very small device such as a PDA.  Right now the usable image size is about 15 to 20 inches.  They hope to…

Tis an important consideration. Not just for the environment, but for product life cycle costs as seen by the customer. Fortunately the more speed by cranking up the power dissapation trend has passed. They didn't change from this paradigm for green reasons, but rather they couldn't cool the babies, notice how GHz ratings have barely budged in the last few years -no more doubling every 18months.
Of course most consumers are looking at claimed performance for a given purchase price, but companies with much clusters (like google) are constrained by the amount of power their clusters consume, so the manuafacturers are (slowly) changing their ways. For instance the
latest Intels Core-2 consume more power for more performance.
I hope green PCs do catch on, giving up say 10% of performance has much more than a 10% reduction of power consumption.

A lot of marketing has to do with the computer equivalent of penis-envy: my RAM is bigger than yours, my processor is faster than yours, but at some point you have to realistically look at what you're actually using your computer for.

I picked up (literally) a laptop that was in a pile to be discarded by our office, "because the display wasn't working". It turned out to be a BIOS that hadn't been upgraded. It had a PIII processor, very nice LCD resolution, 256MB RAM. The hard disk was sick (made a lot of noise) and was only 10GB, so I bought a 40GB 5400rpm drive for about $80. Loaded Fedora Core 5 on it. It's a great computer for my college-age son.