Los Angeles Times
March 12, 2007
Silicon Valley powers down: New products and practices aim to reduce the tech hub's
voracious appetite for energy.
There's a power struggle going on in Silicon Valley, and it's taking place outside the boardroom.
In February, Sun Microsystems Inc. became the first California technology company to be
approved by the environmental coalition Ceres. Sun has a vice president of eco-responsibility
and announced the industry's first "eco-responsible servers" in December 2005, drawing only
as much power as a household lightbulb, according to the citation. It also kept nearly 7,000 cars
off the road last year by allowing employees to work from home whenever possible, and 95% of
its products are being recycled.
Microprocessor makers Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. were listed among the top
five in the 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2007 survey, scoring well in the environment category.
The rivals have worked together to address social and environmental concerns at factories.
AMD recently sponsored a report by Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford
University, to raise awareness of the amount of energy consumed by data centers, which are
packed with computer servers.
His study found that U.S. data centers' power consumption in 2005 was equivalent to the output
of five 1,000-megawatt power stations. That massive demand is taxing utility companies. Pacific
Gas & Electric Company, responsible for the Bay Area, has offered the rest of the country an
example with a program to encourage energy efficiency in data centers.
PG&E gives financial incentives to companies who consolidate their servers and use
"virtualization" techniques. These create a set of virtual machines on a single server, ensuring
that it runs at full capacity and reduces the need for other servers.
One PG&E customer consolidated 230 servers on just 11 new machines. Data centers can use
up to 100 times as much energy per square foot as typical office space and PG&E offers cooling
system improvements and airflow management tune-ups to cut bills by as much as half.
It still charges high rates for its electricity compared with those in the rest of the country, which
represents the real cost-cutting incentive.
Google is installing more than 9,000 solar panels at its Mountain View, California, headquarters,
the largest installation in the U.S., to meet 30% of its peak energy needs.
Moving to the microchip level, processor makers have been focusing on performance per watt
rather than blazing speeds. In 1996, Intel developed the first supercomputer capable of a
trillion calculations a second. This teraflop performance needed 10,000 processors housed in
104 cabinets and consumed 500,000 watts of power.
Los Angeles Times
March 12, 2007
This month it demonstrated a lozenge-size 80-core chip that used just 62 watts to break the
teraflop barrier.
Despite such advances, the tendency is for applications to demand ever higher performance,
and we may all be requiring teraflop power by the time the chip becomes available in the next
five years.
But despite this evidence, the Silicon Valley's high-tech community is hardly turning into a
bunch of carbon-neutral tree-huggers overnight. As Koomey discovered, the space constraints
of their customers and cost savings are driving the current efficiencies, rather than a green
agenda: "It's mainly driven by business and IT constraints. They only have a certain amount of
power in their buildings, and they can't keep on putting in more of these [energy-inefficient]
servers," he said.
So enterprises concerned about the size of their utility bills and the capacity in their data
centers are driving the valley's green movement. They just want to consume more and pay less.
By Chris Nuttall, Financial Times