We recently passed the 25th anniversary of the original IBM PC (model 5150). Ever since then, computer marketing has been oriented toward progressively faster, more capable machines.
Original IBM PC
photo from IBM archive
But now, we hear that Intel is 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.
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.
Via Technologies created an artificial "TreeMark™" benchmark (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 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 "Security Suite." That is a portion of the chip that is dedicated to (pseudo)random number generation, as well as 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.
Comments
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.
Posted by: bigTom | September 20, 2006 3:05 PM
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.
Posted by: Greg P | September 20, 2006 9:43 PM
Greg,
That is wonderful. Reusing something is even better than recycling.
Posted by: Joseph j7uy5 | September 20, 2006 9:48 PM