Eco-Responsible Processors?
Browsing through the specs of the new Sun Fire T1 Processor on the Sun website, one runs across the following piece of marketing-ese:
The UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology is the highest- throughput and most eco-responsible processor ever created. (emphasis mine)
What makes something like a processor eco-responsible? Well, the fact that the processor is touted as using “about as much power as a light bulb”, with the rack-mounted server using, according to Ars Technica, “a maximum of 72 watts against the Xeon’s 110 to 165 watts.”
And at the bottom of Sun’s product information page is the following factoid:
Did you know? “The average corporate data center burns through 80 barrels of oil per day. Calculation based on a data center size of 2 MW that burns an equivalent of 3.3 barrels of oil per hour.”
I’m not an expert on these matters, but this is the first time I can remember seeing any computer processor advertisement mentioning the number of barrels of oil it consumes.
WorldChanging wrote a piece about this processor a little while ago, mentioning a C|net article from 2001:
It was an uphill battle for U.S. Dataport, a company in San Jose, Calif., that planned a $1.2 billion server farm that would be the world’s largest data center. It called for 10 huge air-conditioned warehouses on 174 acres that would constantly draw 180 megawatts of electricity—about enough to provide energy for all the homes in a city the size of Honolulu.
and
The total energy consumed by the Internet information technology sector—from silicon manufacturing to wireless networks, cooling systems, desktop PCs and server farms—is an estimated 8 percent to 13 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
Interestingly, most of the power-reduction efforts have previously been marketed towards laptops and portables, devices which rely on batteries, not power from the grid. Now that Sun’s high-profile marketing of its processor’s “eco-efficiency” is aimed at the server space, I’m interested to see how its competitors respond, or if they just ignore it altogether.
In the end, the success of Sun’s processor will rest upon whether it actually brings the goods. Being eco-efficient, it would seem, is for now just a bonus.