Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Power consumption HZ100, HZ250, HZ1000: new numbers | Date | Tue, 2 Aug 2005 13:45:30 -0400 | From | "linux-os \(Dick Johnson\)" <> |
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On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Folkert van Heusden wrote:
>>>> Maybe new desktop systems - but what about the tens of millions of old >>>> systems that don't. >>> >>> Does anyone really give a shit about saving power on the desktop anyway? >>> This is basically a laptop issue. >> >> Eh yes, very much. > > Indeed. Safe the environment etc. > > > Folkert van Heusden
Computers are nearly 100% efficient as heaters. A computer that consumes 100 watts of power puts out a few milliwatts over a network connection. The rest is heat. For every watt of heat, it takes about 1/8th watt to carry the heat away with modern air-conditioners.
So, just my 100 watt "heater" will cost me about US$18.00 per month if I leave it on continuously. I read somewhere, I think in "Communications", that at any one time there are 40 million personal computers "connected" to the Internet. That's 40,000,000 * 18.00 = US$720,000,000.00 per month being consumed, plus the 720,000,000 / 8 = US$90,000,000 to keep them cool.
It's a MONEY problem, something everybody can understand. It's not an environmental problem at all. The environment can certainly sink the 40,000,000 * 100 = 4,000,000,000 (4 billion) watts of power. That's about the sun's energy falling on a 10 km^2 area of land near the equator, a drop in the bucket.
Ideally, a computer that's not doing any work should not consume any power. However, even if you use static RAM and a low-power CPU, computers have always been power sinks. Recent GHz "advances" have upped the power loss to unprecedented amounts. Anything that can help ameliorate the problem will certainly be appreciated by "the masses".
Cheers, Dick Johnson Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips). Warning : 98.36% of all statistics are fiction. . I apologize for the following. I tried to kill it with the above dot :
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