We need more power-efficient hardware and software
I’m sure by now you’ve noticed that the costs of energy are going up, and will only continue to go up in the future. And this is true not only for oil, but also for other types of energy depending on oil and gas, such as electricity. All of this has to do with something most of the media is still in denial about, namely Peak Oil. While demand for oil is only increasing because of the growth of economies around the world and in particular China, oil production around the world seems to have reached its maximum and will be declining in the near future. Oil wells around the world are running out and it turns out that others contain less oil than was expected. And apart from the fact that it now becomes a lot more difficult to get oil from the remaining oil wells, the quality of the oil in those wells is also much lower. Indeed in many countries, oil production has peaked and companies are finding it difficult to maintain the amount of barrels produced daily, let alone increase production.
There are stories appearing everywhere about oil prices going up and energy shortages. And with demand growing, it can only get worse in the future. For a more in-dept analysis and details, you may want to read this article by Michael Ruppert.
We’ve recently also seen that Microsoft installed the largest solar panel system in Silicon valley at it’s Mountain View campus. While they seemed to put the emphasis on the need for being more environment friendly, it seems they’re also looking at alternative ways to satisfy their energy demands:
Rolling blackouts are sometimes mandated in Silicon Valley during the summer months when power consumption is at its highest. The system is designed to deliver maximum output when the local energy grid is under the greatest strain.
Yes, with less energy available and costs going up, solar energy seems to be one of the possible solutions. However, the important thing to note is that solar energy isn’t anywhere capable to completely satisfy the energy demand. They’re only using it to help provide part of the energy they need.
Another possible solution, is ethanol based energy. We’ve recently seen Bill Gates investing in Pacific Ethanol, a producer of corn-based fuel. You have to wonder why he’s doing that, when it is fairly known that you need more energy to produce ethanol than you can get out of it. Even Gates himself has admitted that once:
You know, there’s actually a lot of energy if we have those new techniques. Things like ethanol would actually cost you more energy than you’d get out of them, so you might not want to spend too much of your money on that, you know, that kind of approach.
So right now, it seems there are no alternative sources of energy to replace oil and natural gas. You’d think that based on this fact, companies would start producing more energy efficient hardware and equipment.
Which is one of the reasons why I recently lashed out at nVidia and ATI. While we should be looking at getting more performance out of hardware using less energy, they are manufacturing technology that needs absurd amounts of power to give you the performance you need.
Fortunately companies like AMD seem to be better aware of the need to produce power-efficient hardware. They currently have the lead when it comes to power consumption of CPUs, with their CPUs using less power while performing better than CPUs from Intel. This seems to be why Sun uses Opteron processors in their servers. For some nice detailed analysis between AMD and Intel, check out this article on Tom’s Hardware. And while the difference in costs for powerusage doesn’t seem that much for a single PC at home, remember that those costs are only going to become much more in the future. And for companies with lots of workstations and entire serverfarms, the difference in costs in a year could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And with Windows Vista coming out soon, companies who will want to take advantage of that new OS and the new Aero interface will have to upgrade their workstations with 3D capable videocards which can provide a minimum level of performance in 3D. Here you can see the need once again for videocards that use little power while providing the performance you need. If not, companies upgrading to Windows Vista and wanting to use Aero will see an increase in costs for powerusage which could be significant depending on how many workstations they have.
We also need software that’s more aware of powerconsumption and efficiency. There are a lot of cool powermanagement features coming in Windows Vista, but we’ll need much more. Software will have to be engineered in such a way where it doesn’t unnecessarily consume CPU power with operations that aren’t needed, while it can perform needed operations as quickly and efficiently as possible. We also need software that’s smart enough to turn off hardware and disable software and background services that we don’t need at a given moment, and automatically turn them on when we need them. If you want an example of just how much power can be wasted on poorly written software, take a look at this article about how a bug in a driver from Microsoft was using up more than an hour of battery life.
Remember how in the old days programmers were using all kinds of tricks to make their programs as small as possible, run as fast as possible using less operations and consume little resources? The trend the last few years has been the opposite. There were increasingly more resources available, from CPU power to RAM to disk space and power (electricity). And as a result, software has become less efficient and more bloated, while also needing more resources (CPU power, RAM, diskspace etc.), often to be able to perform the same kind of tasks older software could do with less resources.
Just a few days ago I found a song titled “Satellite One” done by Jonne Valtonen (aka Purple Motion – Thanks Leslie!) back in the old days. You can download it here in S3M format, and you can play it with XMPlay. It’s about 40KB in size, and the music is great. Think of the skill and creativity that went into the creation of such content back in those days of computing. Today games come with megabytes of music data, while requiring much more resources for playback.
It seems to me that we’ll need that kind of skill and creativity again in the future.
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