Green is the New Gold - Power Supplies
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I’ll start with computer power supplies. This is what takes the power from the outlet and turns it into power for the computer to use. If you can remember back to your grade school days and physics classes, you'll recall that whenever you convert power, you lose some in the process. Computers can’t break the laws of physics; thus, power supplies are inefficient and lose power every second they are on.
Power supplies are rated all the way up to 1200 watts, so we are talking serious amounts of electricity being used. Until recently, there really weren’t any standards for efficiency. But now, a new standard called 80 PLUS certification has been introduced. This certification means that a PSU has to be at least 80% energy efficient or better while handling 20%, 50%, and 100% load. The going price for 80 PLUS certified PSUs tend to be a little higher than the non-certified counterpart, but they are still reasonably priced. Running your computer for a couple of years on the new PSU will recoup some, if not all, of the additional costs.
CPU
AMD has also been really pushing their energy efficient CPU in the last year or two. Early last year, Intel introduced their Core 2 Duo line up, which not only has a cooler-running CPU compared to the Pentium D’s, but they're also a lot quicker. AMD shifted a great deal of their marketing campaign toward being more green. I’m not sure if it was due to the change in consumer interest, or the fact that they didn’t have the fastest hardware. Either way, they wanted to have the greenest products.
The Brisbane core brought the total heat output down to 65 watts, which is pretty cool for a CPU. Some interesting information I managed to gather was that both Intel and AMD are going greener from an all-around production standpoint. Specifically, their production plants are going greener. Intel has recently built a $3 billion dollar lab that is revolutionary as far as emissions are concerned.
Due to the nature of CPU design and the die shrinkage, each generation should consume less power per core than its predecessor. There are some exceptions, such as the Prescott core, but in general, at least for a while, we’ll see greener and greener CPUs.
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