[geeks] power usage

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>Date: 2008/08/16 Sat PM 01:51:58 EDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] New Intel Atom-based barebones system

<snip>

>The newer Xeon CPUs use a lot less power than the older ones, but it  
>appears that they cannot slow down their clock like other Intel CPUs.

Therein lies the rub of using a server CPU in a desktop - all the speedstep technologies (lowering clock to save power) in Intel CPUs were originally designed for mobile use (IIRC), and it seems that Server power consumption is only a recent concern.

I may have mentioned this here before, but I have seen published specifications from Dell that indicate that a "sleeping" desktop uses less power than a "powered off" desktop of the same model. Understand, the difference is a few watts (IIRC 4 watts in "sleep" mode, 7 watts "powered off") - my only explaination is that the NIC can be powered off when the system is sleeping, but is on (for WOL support) when the system is turned off...

$work is trying to arrive at an energy usage baseline for all our systems, then see if we can cut back on the electricity usage for our machines - we have aboout 1,400 desktops from 0 - 5 years old, and they currently "sleep" about 2/3rds of the time... If we powered them off, power usage would likely go up!

Lionel