Power Consumption & Google
Energy efficiency has proven to be a concern for Google. A new report from Morgan Stanley points to Google purchasing AMD chips for near-term replacement needs when servicing its estimated 200,000 or more servers.
The rationale behind the switch from Intel:
There he discussed the importance of power-efficiency in servers, stating that in some cases simply switching on server hardware and running it for its three-year lifetime can cost a company half as much as it paid for the hardware in electricity fees…
It’s a bit of a convoluted way of saying what’s been said before, namely, that over the lifetime of the computer hardware, the cost of power to run the hardware may someday be much higher than the cost of the hardware.
The question ultimately comes down to “work per watt” and is something I’ve touched on before.