Would seem to be a common misconception that CPUs are only happy when they are sucking lots of power, well today we will cover the cost of this power, and discuss why this misconception is mostly false.
Your average conventional desktop CPU uses 95-130 watts (a measurement of joules per second), however both Intel and AMD are making conventional CPUs as well as "low power CPUs" that somehow run in the same gigaherts, and on average produce nearly the same calculations per second as their conventional counterparts.
Some of the new Core2Duo and Phenom CPUs even suck 145 watts.
We have covered the heavy weight contenders, no on to the slim distance runners. Intel makes several low power processors in starting at 65 watts, and going down to around 40 watts, and they have a special platform called the Atom that makes as low as 0.65 watts. Personally, in my home and everyday business use, we only use Atom based platforms.
My atom desktop is a dual core 1.6 ghz, does everything I need for severe web browsing, document editing, some pretty regular photoshopping and even DVD ripping, this little power house uses 8 watts of power.
My atom laptop is a single core 1.6 ghz, still just as potent, I have 25 browser tabs open this very moment, along with a pdf and excel sheet. This unit uses a whopppping 2.5 watts.
Now thats all great, I have reduced my power usage by over 90%, I am reducing my carbon footprint dramatically, but the real joy is when I leave my charger at home in the morning, work throughout the day on my 2 pound laptop, then come home, have dinner, sit on the couch with my wife, and work some more, and finally go to bed and plug my laptop in to charge, all without burning my legs (i like to call those 17 inch Dells leg warmers;).
Moving on to servers, these things need some real computing power, conventional servers use one or 2, or even more 140-160 watt CPUs, some of my clients have a few of these. Now these things run day and night 24/7/366 - that could be some considerable consumption. But even here there is room to spare, Intel has low power Xeon server processors starting at 80 watts, and going all the way down to 38 watts, and they are real computers, a single one of these does what 2 CPUs did 5 years ago and at a great power savings.
Moving on to the numbers that actually matter:
Your power company bills you by the kilowatt hour (1000's of watts per hour). The average power company charges $0.11 per kwh, but here in Southern California, since power is greener than the rest of the nation we pay $0.13, so being greener pays all the more.
So the conventional CPU (just the processor) if run 8 hours per day, would cost as follows:
95 watts= .095 kwh x .13 x 8 hours x 365 days = $36 per year
If it was an 8 watt 1.6 ghz dual core Atom CPU:
8 watts= .008 kwh x .13 x 8 hours x 365 days = $3 per year
Or if you desire more processing power, there are several options in 45 watt area: = $17/year
Or if you for instance use my Atom based eee netbook @ 2.4 watts: $0.95/year
Now a Xeon server cpu running 24/7 @ 160 watts would use: $182/year
Ok, some may say thats barely negligible, but many companies have many workstations, and sometimes even many servers. Most workstations are not on 24/7, but looking at making your next server purchase as an experiment in efficiency may put you on the road to savings soon.
The average 'green' cpu will cost 15-20% more than its conventional counterpart, and sometimes 15% less even. Lets say a 3 ghz 160 watt xeon is $330, and its 65 watt counterpart is $380, the $50 difference would be recovered in less than 6 months: $182 vs $74/year. You may only have 1 server now, but who knows next year you may need 2, 3-4 servers saving you $100 each could be quite helpful.
Other things to think about:
There are several other areas in the computer that can be optimized, such as:
- high efficiency hard drives
- low power memory
- low power fans
Not too mention, less power will mean less heat generation, which converts to less cooling costs, overall power savings could be considerable, just as Google did with their servers.
Not saying some people dont need true high power computing, for instance one of my customers runs a photolab and where they run Photoshop on 10-15 layers, with 25 megapixel cameras out now, you can burn some gigahertz really fast, they truelly needed a Quad Core i7 with 6gb ram.
For more information on processor power usage Intel list all of their CPUs here.
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Its even on the 10 o'clock news - 
