Intel Claims Core Microprocessors Saved World Economy $2 Billion In Energy Costs
Intel’s engineers compared the power consumption of current generation Core processors with that of previous generations of processors. They came up with some impressive savings, so has Greenpeace found a friend in the semiconductor industry?
Calculating the amount of energy that has been saved over the last two years by taking into consideration power consumption, number of processors sold and the length of time they were expected to be running, engineers estimated a saving of 20 Terawatt hours compared to what earlier generations would have used over the same amount of time.
General Manager of Intel’s Eco-Technology Program Lorie Wigle published an article on an Intel blog explaining how the energy efficiency of the Core microarchitecture has saved the world economy $2 Billion in energy costs since its launch in 2006, assuming a $0.10 per kWh price tag.
The electricity bill for businesses that run computers 24 hours a day can be quite expensive. Using components with lower power consumption can cut costs significantly over the long term. While maximum performance is generally desired by end users more than reducing their carbon footprint, reductions in energy costs is always a welcome bonus.
Ironically, Intel recently began shipping their new dual-core Atom 330 processor, which has a power consumption double that of the Atom 230. While the Atom 330 itself does not significantly contribute to the world’s power consumption compared to Intel’s far more powerful desktop parts, this move goes completely against the semiconductor giant’s claim to be able to "have [their] cake and eat it too" - increase performance while reducing power consumption.
Instead of creating processors on a smaller die,and try to keep powerdraw as low as possible, they often increased powerdraw in favor for cpu speed.
Atom dualcore is a processor that will probably replace many of the Core2Duo and older singlecore machines out there!
The TDP might be double of the Atom single core, but it can do nearly everything a normal user needs(appart from gaming or CPU intensive tasks),including running Vista,which was just too slow for the single core Atom.
Remember that the average Core2Duo has a TDP of arround 40W, someless, some more. and some have a TDP of over 100Watts.
That'd be the same as running 12 atom cores on one system!
Then negated all their previous efforts with Phenom.
P4 is OK, not really as bad as two P4 stick side to side. Oh, wait.....
and not green.
I would like to see an energy test round up with P4's, C2D's, Athlon XP's, early gen AMD64 and Current gen AMD64(AM2 & AM2+).
Remember that the average Core2Duo has a TDP of arround 40W, someless, some more. and some have a TDP of over 100Watts.That'd be the same as running 12 atom cores on one system!
While probably being more powerful than 12 Atoms too.
Remember that the TDP of a Phenom is less than alot of Intel Quads... of course the Intels chips take less time to do the same thing, but the Phenoms still have a leser max TDP and the Chipset draws less power.
Besides the CPU gamingmarket hasn't got much to offer anymore. The only games produced are Doom and Quake clones (which I was never a fan of)with higher graphics.
Plus many gaming companies go bankrupt or refuse to produce games for the pc feeling that they are more copied illegal than on gamingsystems.
And thus shifting their attention to the gamingsystems like nintendo, Sega, XBox and Playstation.
Games of these caliber can easely be played on a Atom dualcore with dual DDR and a Radeon3850 installed.
I understand the most powerfull pc's are necessary to play crisis, but I think the majority of people just don't play that kind of games.
The only con is, that intel prides itself on a lower TDP on the processor, but in return the Northbridge consumes lots more power than average for such devices.
Intel would do good with the release of the dualcore Atom, to release a Northbridge on 45nm, supporting the fastest memory, and have a system that's able to display HD movies (although the majority of people are not using their PC to view HD movies).
The Atom is quite the bang for the bucks too, if you consider regular office tasks, and occasional multimedia.