Intel’s New Green Processor Offers $2 Billion In Energy Savings
Intel’s new microprocessor was designed with the environment in mind. The company says the chip is not only rocket fast but is also extremely energy efficient. The chip—code named Nehalem—follows the Intel Core II and IV series processors.
Nehalem engineers had to tweak both the chip’s clock cycle and its operating voltage, both of which typically eat up a lot of energy. The biggest energy cut came from reducing usage on an idle machine; a lot of the chip’s life-cycle is spent idle. So that makes sense, if you’re not in the room…turn off the lights.
There’s a catch, though. The chip still needs to be “active” enough to receive instructions. Historically, chips remained fully powered during the idle stage in order to catch any instructions thrown their way—not anymore.
Intel estimates that switching to Nehalem processors could save $2 billion dollars in energy costs and up to 20 terawatt hours. The company also suggests that 2 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions globally are from computers. Maybe it’s time to upgrade?
Image source: Intel
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November 2nd, 2008 at 3:59 am
Well holy shit good on Intel. This sort of thing is the key to adapting our energy consumption to follow with the changes we must enact.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:37 am
All marketing gimmick .
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:26 am
Wow, now that is truly some kind of savings. Well done.
Jiff
http://www.internet-anonymity.net.tc
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:30 am
That 2% must mean 2% of the human contribution.
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:36 am
Congrats, you got dugg to front page
http://digg.com/tech_news/Intel_s_Green_Processor_Offers_2_Billion_In_Energy_Savings
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:40 am
I call shenanigans. Those sorts of sweeping generalizations are pure marketing fluff. I’m sure the processor is more energy-efficient, but given real workloads, how much do you really save over the latest processor, or an Itanium?
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:04 am
Marketing rhetoric. They need energy efficiency, so that the platform can grow to require more when speeds increase, because they want to use it in notebooks and because they want more and more cores in a single chip. So yes, it’s great that it’s more energy efficient, but don’t believe the green nonsense, that’s not their real motivation, that’s just a sales pitch.
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:35 pm
“Historically, chips remained fully powered during the idle stage in order to catch any instructions thrown their way—not anymore.”
This is simply not true. Both AMD and Intel have technologies that scale the CPU down while idle. Please look up AMD’s Cool’n Quiet and Intel’s Speedstep technologies.
There are some power differences with the new architecture. Some of the cache was changed to a different design that uses less power but takes up more space. Also each core can now be clocked independently to reduce power draw of idle cores. This is an improvement on speedstep, something that AMD’s barcelona chips already do.
This entire article is nothing but marketing spin and leaves out any actual details.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I think it’s good that it saves energy. We need things like this in the world today
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:59 am
man this chip has been hyped up like nothing else before it.