“Electricity” by Man Ray
Google is calling on the computer industry to create a simpler and more efficient power supply standard that it says will save billions of kilowatt-hours of energy a year.
In a white paper to be presented on the opening day of the Intel Developer Forum here, two leading data center designers at Google were to argue Tuesday that the industry was mired in inefficiency for historical reasons dating to the introduction of the first IBM personal computer in 1981.
At that time, standard power units, which convert high-voltage alternating current to low-voltage direct current, were required to provide multiple output voltages, something that is no longer necessary in today’s PCs.
The Google engineers and others said there was a significant design flaw, which they described as “overprovisioning,” in PC power supplies. “It’s like putting a 400-horsepower engine in every car just because some cars have to tow large trailers every once in a while,” said Chris Calwell, a technical adviser for a separate project to increase PC efficiency.
The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense – deploying new power supplies in 100 million desktop PCs running eight hours a day, it says, would make it possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion of power at California’s energy rates.
Although Google does not plan to enter the personal computer market, the company is a large purchaser of microprocessors and has evolved a highly energy-efficient power supply system for its data centers.
The Google plan calls for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of such power supply units would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiency.
Makes way too much sense ever to happen. Even Ted Stevens could understand this. After all, Google is just passing along what they’ve already been doing.
My computers all run 24/7 I would welcome an opportunity to lower my electrical bill. You go Google!
It would be a very good thing but trying to steer the dinasour that is intel and the pc market is a big task. One even the mighty google prob does not have the power to do
This one is a no-brainer and should be implemented. This kind of idea is why Google is in such ascendancy and why Migrosoft and Intel seem so constantly to be out of touch with what the market needs.
Just watch – the federal government will get involved and try next to mandate this in order to help reduce the load on the electrical generation and distribution infrastructure.
And even moreso if you can run it all from battery-ballasted solar: DC to DC, 12-volt standard. Look, ma, the meter isn’t running!
Thinkpads have a 16V DC power supply. You can get by with less voltage, but I think that 12 volts would be “pushing the envelope”.
Makes total sense. Intel has been pushing efficencies in total platform dissipation for years. Link. [edited: pls use tinyurl]
What is needed is a BIG consumer like Google to MANDATE further improvements. Even so, good progress has been made since the ATX standard.
If this is such a great idea why doesn’t Google make it’s own mobo’s, hard drives and peripherals? I agree, it would be great just to have a power cord coming out of the mobo, but hard drives, cd drives, USB controllers, expansion slots of several different flavors and the like all have their own power requirements, and I doubt they will all ever agree on a one size fits all standard. Even if the power was somehow distributed in the mobo thermal issues would still be a problem.
Google has giant server farms, and custom designed power setups would work for them, but for the individual computer users in their millions (billions?) will, for now, have to stick with their individual power supplies.
Ok, I guess I must be the only one missing the point here.
A 400W PS does not draw 400W all the time, just at peak demands.
I don’t see how converting the 12V -> 3.3 etc on the MB would be that much more efficient than converting in the PS.
In fact, PS manufactures can derive the power off special secondary windings. This would seem to me to be more efficient than converting to 12, which is then converted to the lower voltage.
#6 Google has no plans to get into the hardware business. What they’re saying is that the industry is looking at saving there customers money on more power efficient CPU and HDD (upcoming Flash drives). Why not look at the whole power system. Just because this is how we do it in the past doesn’t mean we can’t change. Google is a big customer of these vendors and they use customer power supplies on their systems that saves them money on power used running the systems and cooling the systems (A/C) because their units put out less heat.
I liked the picture.
I’ve been out of amateur electronics for awhile, but am still an engineer as well as a computer scientist. Some questions if there an electrical or electronic engineer reading this:
How much power saving is there likely to be from having a single transformer putting out 12 volts, as opposed to the 15 volts that my laptop “brick” puts out?
In a desktop PC, are we better off having a simple transformer putting out 12 volts only (then dropping those voltages with regulators or whatever), as opposed to multiple taps putting out 12v, 5v, and whatever else?
In other words, are the Google engineers right, or are there really no savings to be had here? If there were savings, why wasn’t this idea tried before?
It has been a long time since I dabbled in this crap, but let me see if I can answer it.
Every time the voltage is stepped down, there is an efficiency loss which usually goes into heat.
Changing from AC current to DC current has an even higher efficiency lose.
And then, AC is a more efficient current for most applications.
Most computers use three voltages, 12, 5, and 3.3, all DC. When the first personal computers were being put together, power efficiency was not the problem it is today.
The Us power system is OLD and obsolete.
Even tho we have been paying for power for 80 years they have not updated much, if anything to Current or improved performance. Why you may ask?? Because the Electric company DONT OWN 90% of the power, they only market it and sell it to you.
As to the power supplies, it would be nice NOT to heat my home in summer with something putting out about 100 F, of heat.
Between the CPU, PS, GPU, onboard controllers…We are using MORE and more fans to cool the systems. Inlarging the DIE on the chipset will only let HEAT out Differently.
How about an industry standard for handling all the power requirements of the peripherals?
I’ve got 2 external USB hard drives (2 separate power lines), a router, a powered USB hub, cordless mouse, 2 printers, a scanner, speakers, USB TV/video adapter and a monitor. Including the PC, that’s 12 separate power lines. – Wouldn’t it be great if the power was simply run through the same wire that connects them to the PC?
On the industry side, there is some concensus developing on power standards. Intel and IBM recently joined the PMBus group, who have created an open-source digital power management protocol.
Just last week I was at the Digital Power Forum, and their data center track was very well attended. Dynamic power management using a digital communications bus will allow for large-scale economies at the server farm level, a place where unbelievable amounts of power is wasted.
An additional advantage of a common power management protocol is increased device interoperability. UPS systems can monitor power, thermal protection systems can poll the individual power converters on the board about their temperature, and if you fold in the SMBus for smart batteries, you could have a complete intelligent power system.
There is also a large amount of debate on removing the ac/dc power supplies from the individual blades and using a 24-V rack bus. There are savings to be realized, but the hard part is getting everyone to agree.
Comment by Improbus — “My computers all run 24/7 “
Right! What OS do you use? 🙂
Didn’t someone post on here that homes should add in a DC power bus. Aren’t you now suggesting the opposite?