A Google engineer who studies the power consumption of the servers in its data centers has thrown cold water on the current approach adopted by chip manufacturers trying to churn out more "low power" processors used by mobile gadgets for use in servers. Simply put, trying to port lessons gleaned from mobile computing over to the data center just won't cut it. Speaking at the O'Reilly Conference, Luis Barroso noted that the problem is that a mobile device experiences a completely different mode of operation compared with a typical server.
The reason is that the processor in a mobile device spends most of its time idling. On the other hand, a server in one of Google's data centers spends most of its time performing moderate processing with hardly any lull periods. Rather than focusing on chips that are efficient only during periods of low activity, the solution would be to create products that are able to dynamically scale their power demands in tandem with diminished processing.
For more on power efficiency in servers:
- check out this CNET News.com article [1]
Links:
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9975495-54.html