Fujitsu Siemens's zero-watt PC not all it seems

 

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By David Fearon in Hannover

Posted on 3 Mar 2009 at 15:45

Fujitsu-Siemens has been demonstrating its new zero-watt products at CeBIT, and though impressive there are some notable caveats.

The company has been showing both zero-watt PCs and zero-watt monitors. However, it's not quite as cut and dried as it seems. The claim of zero watts in standby actually applies only to the P22W-5 monitor.

The Esprimo E7935 desktop PC consumes zero either in fully off mode or in hibernation, but not in Windows' standard suspend-to-RAM sleep mode. We also observed a power meter attached to one of the monitors showing slightly more than zero watts - 0.1W to be precise - although to be fair it was flickering between 0.1 and 0.0, so it's fair to say that standby consumption is very low indeed.

So how does it work? "We can't tell you that yet," says director of marketing infrastructure products Juergen Heidegger, citing pending patents. But he thinks it will give Fujitsu Siemens a "significant" advantage over competitors, especially if the company is granted the patents it's looking for.