The Guardian, London
If you want to start a rumor, how about that Google is going to build its own nuclear power station? The logic is easy. Larry Page, the company's co-founder, reportedly sees "running out of power" as the biggest potential threat to Google, and the electricity needed to run its "server farms" -- tens of thousands of power-hungry computers storing billions of Internet pages -- could soon cost more than the hardware. Partly this is because Google is based in California, where the state solved its 2001 energy crisis by borrowing US$10 billion to buy electricity at massively inflated prices. But the rest of us are heading in the same direction.
We live in a world where the use of chip-based computers and consumer electronics devices is increasing rapidly, while supplies of oil and natural gas are diminishing perhaps even more rapidly. Worse, the threat of global warming means we should now be decreasing our energy use, like the Japanese, not increasing it. And although each individual PC or peripheral may not use much electricity, when you have a billion of them, it adds up.
Powering down
Sadly, it's impossible to say how much power a PC uses without measuring it, because of variables such as the type of motherboard, the speed of the chip and the power of the graphics card. (A fast graphics card can use more power than the processor.) PC power supplies can range from about 150W to about 650W, and will actually draw more than that during peak loads. However, PCs use much less power when idling and the US Energy Star program -- which PC manufacturers have been following since 1992 -- is aiming to get the power consumption on idle below 50-60W.
The simplest approach is to use the PC's power-saving software to turn the screen and hard drive off and then suspend the whole system after a specified time.
The situation is improving thanks to market trends towards flat screens and the use of portables rather than desktop computers. LCDs use much less power than traditional monitors, and by design, most notebooks use less power than most desktops. At the extremes, the 1GHz Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage chip uses only 5W whereas Intel's hottest chip for gaming, the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme, can consume up to 115W.
However, Intel has done a U-turn on its processor design goals, which should help. The Pentium design drove up clock speeds (and power consumption) to build the fastest chips. In 2002, Intel executives still assured me that "gigahertz is far from over" and looked forward to a 4.7GHz Pentium codenamed Tejas. Last year, however, they announced a new mantra: "performance per Watt."
Alistair Kemp, a spokesman for Intel, says the company has now developed "a new microarchitecture that will be coming out in the second half of this year." New chips will, he says, "reduce average power use quite substantially." The reduction will be from about 95W, for a fast Pentium 4, to about 65W.
Performance per Watt is also important for the arrays of servers in corporate data centers. Luiz Andre Barroso, principal engineer at Google, has already warned that "the possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."
In an article called "The Price of Performance" in the professional journal ACM Queue, Barroso expressed concern at the cost of providing computers, with electricity overtaking the cost of buying the hardware in the first place.
Running costs are exacerbated because companies generally try to utilize their servers as heavily as possible 24/7, or 8,760 hours a year. Faster processors generate more heat, so computer rooms require extra cooling. This uses more electricity, costing more money.
Of course, there's nothing new about any of this. The late Seymour Cray, the world's greatest supercomputer designer, spent a lot of his time on plumbing. In 1985, he resorted to pumping a non-conducting liquid called Fluorinert over the Cray 2's electronics to cool them. When mainframes ruled the world, IBM packed its mainframe chips in ceramic Thermal Conduction Modules with chilled water flowing through pipes to conduct away the heat. Some of today's high-performance games PCs use similar techniques, and it's still an option for servers -- but no one wants to go back to plumbing.
multiprocessors
Barroso suggests that multiprocessor chips are "the best [and perhaps only] chance to avoid the dire future envisioned above". What has changed recently is that multicore processors -- with more than one processing element on a single die -- have finally entered the mainstream, and many PC manufacturers are now shipping systems with Intel Core Duo processors that deliver more per watt than their forebears.
Indeed, the idea has even reached the home market. Microsoft's Xbox 360 games console has a processor with three IBM PowerPC cores, each of which can run two programming threads: the result is a single chip that can work like six. Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3 will use an IBM Cell chip with multiple processing elements.
Not even low-power multicore chips will solve the power consumption problem permanently, but they should at least buy us a few years breathing space.
And if people factor the cost of power consumption (and cooling, where required) into their computer purchasing decisions, both for commercial and ecological reasons, this will put pressure on the manufacturers to do even better in the future.
Tropical Storm Usagi strengthened to a typhoon yesterday morning and remains on track to brush past southeastern Taiwan from tomorrow to Sunday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was approximately 950km east-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost point, the CWA said. It is expected to enter the Bashi Channel and then turn north, moving into waters southeast of Taiwan, it said. The agency said it could issue a sea warning in the early hours of today and a land warning in the afternoon. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was moving at
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
UPDATED FORECAST: The warning covered areas of Pingtung County and Hengchun Peninsula, while a sea warning covering the southern Taiwan Strait was amended The Central Weather Administration (CWA) at 5:30pm yesterday issued a land warning for Typhoon Usagi as the storm approached Taiwan from the south after passing over the Philippines. As of 5pm, Usagi was 420km south-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost tip, with an average radius of 150km, the CWA said. The land warning covered areas of Pingtung County and the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春), and came with an amended sea warning, updating a warning issued yesterday morning to cover the southern part of the Taiwan Strait. No local governments had announced any class or office closures as of press time last night. The typhoon
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
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