[extropy-chat] ECON: Chip market responds to high oil prices...

[Mike Lorrey]

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/08/gigahertz_is_ti.html
Gigahertz? Oh mom, that's so ... last generation 
By JOHN PACZKOWSKI, Good Morning Silicon Valley

In semiconductor fashion, "performance per watt" is the new gigahertz,
at least according to Intel's designers. In his first Intel Developers'
Forum keynote as CEO, Paul Otellini announced a next-generation
microprocessor architecture that emphasizes power conservation over raw
performance. "We're changing our engineering focus from clock speed to
multicore processors. Multicore allows us to continue performance
without the penalties we saw [with the] gigahertz approach," Otellini
said. "[Going forward] we will create and build products and platforms
that deliver new levels of performance and energy efficiency and have
communications technology built into them. ... It's time to take things
to the next level. From now on, chip performance will be measured per
watt." 

Among the products Otellini discussed were three chip lines due at
market in the second half of 2006. Code-named Merom, Conroe and
Woodcrest, they are designed for notebooks, desktops and servers,
respectively. They will all feature dual cores for lower power
consumption, and according to Otellini will boast performance-per-watt
increases of three to five times over their respective predecessors.
"Given the power reduction with Merom and Conroe and today's California
electricity costs, computer users can save $1 billion per year for
every 100 million (computer) units sold. And that doesn't include the
cost of cooling," Otellini said. For Intel, which has spent years and
billions of dollars convincing consumers that clock speed is the
primary driver of performance, the shift to multicore and a focus on
power efficiency is a sea change of sorts, and one that's been a long
time coming. Said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research,
"This is an acknowledgment that the market is more than just megahertz
now." 

- end quote -

Otellini based his calcs on saving 30 watts per PC which, depending on
how many hours a day your run it, could be anywhere between 3,000,000 -
72,000,000 kwh per day per 100 million PCs. At $0.10 kwh, thats
$300,000-7,200,000/day per 100 million PCs in energy savings, or $110
million-$2.64 billion per year, so he must be expecting that the
average PC is run for almost 10 hours per day.

As the average PC's share of this will be $10/year, and power utilities
conservation departments generally like to see a two year ROI on
conservation rebates, we might see $20 rebates from electric utilities
to upgrade machines to the new chip technology.

If your utility is not offering such rebates you should lobby them to
do so, though if you are libertarian you may want to ensure that the
utility is paying for them with its own funds and not getting tax
dollars from the Department of Energy directly or through a regional
distribution Power Authority organization like the TVA or BPA, etc., as
is often the case with conservation rebate funds.

Optimally, if you want to work on this issue, you should lobby your
utility to guage the PC usage of each person applying for the rebate,
so that those who use their PCs (or leave them on) the most get the
largest rebates (should be about $50 by my calcs for those who leave a
PC on all day long all week).

This rebate may be mitigated by how long you own the PC. The utility
may require you to use the PC for at least the two years of the ROI
period, or else pro-rate your rebate if you only use the new machine
12-18 months. As this $50 rate is also based on a $0.10 /kwh electric
rate, this should be adjusted downward if you have cheaper power than
this (i.e. you Seattle area residents).

Also, as Otellini states, this does not count A/C savings, but the
$0.10 /kwh power rate is retail price, not generation cost, so the
utility may want to recover the A/C savings as its overhead margin.


Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com