DailyTech - Google, Intel Launch Energy Efficiency Program

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IT Google, Intel Launch Energy Efficiency Program
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - June 13, 2007 1:29 PM

18 comment(s) - last by spillai.. on Jun 25 at 12:12 PM

A coalition of companies plan to help save energy and reduce greenhouse gases in the immediate future

Google and Intel recently announced they have launched a program to help save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by offering energy-efficient PCs and servers. The "Climate Savers Computing Initiative" will help create new guidelines and efficiency goals for computers that control power consumption. The coalition also hopes to save up to $5.5 billion in energy costs per year.

"Let's create a more efficient IT industry by driving up the efficiency of computers," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel Digital Enterprise Group vice president.

Dell, IBM, Lenovo Group, the U.S. Environment Protection Agency and at least 25 other companies, organizations and universities are participants in the coalition. Each company and university will promote the program in different manners -- for example, Google will send users to participating company web sites. An additional 15 or so companies -- including Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and the World Wildlife Fund -- openly support the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

"Today, the average desktop PC wastes nearly half of its power, and the average server wastes one-third of its power," said Urs Holzle, Google vice president of operations.

According to a study released by the group, carbon dioxide emissions could be limited by as much as 54 tons per year -- the equivalent of 11 million cars. To limit that level of carbon dioxide emissions, however, PC power supplies need 90% efficiency. The group also hopes to raise energy efficiency by 50% within three years.

Supporting companies and organizations agree to purchase PCs and servers that meet energy efficiency standards.

Group organizers will soon launch a program aimed at educating consumers, other companies and governments about how to use technology more efficiently.

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Real Story

By TomZ on 6/13/2007 2:45:42 PM , Rating: 2

The "real story" here is the potential for power - and therefore cost - savings. Most companies care 100x more about saving money than they do about reducing CO2 emissions.

RE: Real Story

By therealnickdanger on 6/13/2007 3:55:06 PM , Rating: 3

Naturally, but the CO2 emissions savings - however asinine - are still good PR for these companies. The suits and the hippies are both happy. Double win.

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RE: Real Story

By lennylim on 6/13/2007 3:57:15 PM , Rating: 2

I agree. Say "you'll save the planet" and while they'll pay lip service, people are unlikely to go far out of their way to do it. Say "it'll save you money" and they get interested.

Savings is not just on power draw. Lower power requirements also means less cooling requirements. A 450W power draw doesn't just mean 450W from the outlet, it also means the ability to extract the heat generated from the server room, and cooling uses a lot of power.

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RE: Real Story

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 6/13/2007 3:57:45 PM , Rating: 4

I'm more interested in the 90% PSU Effeciency. Power savings is the goal, environmental is purely gravy.

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RE: Real Story

By SmokeRngs on 6/13/2007 5:58:14 PM , Rating: 2

Agreed. I'd love to have a true 90% efficient PSU. I'm currently running an 80%+ efficient PSU although due to money constraints, not the one I had wanted.

I personally don't care about the environmental "benefits" but the power savings is very interesting. It would be nice to see this catch on during the design phase of many products as long as the lower power requirements do not lead to a performance penalty in new products or much of a price increase.

As of now, this sounds like nothing more than individual companies pointing to a partner's products that doesn't use as much power as a competitor. It's nice to see more efficient parts getting a bit more press, but I want to see parts designed with low power in mind. If the consumer begins to demand these parts, they will be made and at a small (or no) price premium. It's all dependent on the demands of the consumer.

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Gelsinger...

By Quiksel on 6/13/2007 2:43:40 PM , Rating: 5

quote:
"Let's create a more efficient IT industry by driving up the efficiency of computers," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel Digital Enterprise Group vice president.

Says the guy from the company that made the Prescott. (I kid, I kid)

Seriously, though, this is good press. It might not be as bad as some claim, but any improvement is a good thing.

RE: Gelsinger...

By therealnickdanger on 6/13/07, Rating: 0

RE: Gelsinger...

By Treckin on 6/13/2007 4:39:01 PM , Rating: 1

If the low voltage wasnt necessary to whipping AMD and gaining market share, we would still have NETBURST.
Dont be consumed by the PR reps, and stop jerking off intel.

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RE: Gelsinger...

By therealnickdanger on 6/13/07, Rating: 0

RE: Gelsinger...

By carl0ski on 6/13/2007 7:38:21 PM , Rating: 2

I would like to remind you that Centrino is NOT a cpu

thank you for your time.

P.S Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 Slot weren't extactly a efficiency winner either.
Copppermine and Tualatin P3's were very good.

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RE: Gelsinger...

By theapparition on 6/14/2007 8:05:11 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
I would like to remind you that Centrino is NOT a cpu

True, but the OP intent was still correct. Call it Pentium M then, and his point is still valid.

quote:
P.S Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 Slot weren't extactly a efficiency winner either. Copppermine and Tualatin P3's were very good.

Later Pentium 3's were Coppermine. And if memory serves, were better than competitive offerings at the time.

Everyone seems to forget the "fry an egg" on your Athlon experiments. Or that AMD had a piss poor thermal design and if overheating, would just fry the chips. Even in the "dreaded" Netburst days, the Northwood was (for most benchmarks) superior to the Athlons. Only with the introduction of Prescott on Intels side and Athlon64 on AMD's did the tables take a massive turn with AMD winning (by a large margin) almost every benchmark.

Personally, I liked the Athlon64 designs since they had much, much better FP operations, and for the apps I was running, was the most important. The Pentiums relied too much on SSE optimizations for (mostly) media apps. But I'm not going to call Netbust "crap", since it was very good until Prescott. Everyone, though, seems to forget the true history.

So to recap, Netburst was a tremendous performance success, until the Prescott years. And now, AMD has nothing to counter the signifigant performance delta of the Core architecture. All my Athlon64s have been replaced with Core2's.

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RE: Gelsinger...

By Calin on 6/14/2007 11:22:32 AM , Rating: 2

Not that slot Athlons were using much less power than slot Pentium 3

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Google?

By Spyvie on 6/13/2007 6:07:52 PM , Rating: 2

What the heck could Google possibly have to contribute to this endeavor aside from a few links in some search results? Energy savings is going to have to come from hardware and/or driver revisions. I suppose if Google commits to green server farms it could make a small difference in the big picture but this still reeks of a publicity stunt to me.

RE: Google?

By smitty3268 on 6/13/2007 6:53:26 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Each company and university will promote the program in different manners -- for example, Google will send users to participating company web sites.

Nope, it doesn't sound like they're doing much to me either.

Software can make a big difference with power savings, though. Unnecessary polling wakes up the cpu from low power states and really wastes a lot of power. Intel recently came out with a program which identifies the worst offenders running and the linux desktop has become much more friendly to laptop users since then.

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Saving energy is saving money and lessening the environmental impact...

By Rovemelt on 6/13/2007 8:41:25 PM , Rating: 3

from power generation.

And these companies are making a business of it. I'm happy because it will save me money on the electric bill.

Sounds good to me!

Graphic cards have a long way to go

By kensiko on 6/13/2007 10:02:19 PM , Rating: 3

GPU are facing the same problem that Intel faced. They use too much power and develop too much heat !!

They must slow down performance increase and check about efficiency of their GPU. That's a lot of work but they have to.

Intel

By PlasmaBomb on 6/14/2007 6:29:02 AM , Rating: 2

It's pretty easy to save power when it comes to server upgrades - Change 4x Netburst to 1x Xeon 53xx and get a server speed boost as well. That should give significant power savings for small businesses. The implementation of 90% + PSU sound great and the development of deeper sleep states will also lower idle power consumption.

As other people have said there will be indirect cost savings as the data centres will need less air con.