Google makes plea for new PSU standard

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 27 Sep 2006 at 11:44

Google is urging computer manufacturers to adopt a single 12 Volt power supply for new PCs. According to the New York Times, two Google engineers are due to present a paper to the Intel Developers Forum, currently taking place in San Francisco, arguing that adherence to an obsolete industry standard is wasting huge amounts of electricity and billions of dollars in energy bills.

For historical reasons dating back to the original IBM PC, the power supplies fitted with today's desktop computers are multivoltage units designed to power a number of devices at once. Twenty five years of technical advance means that modern computers need nothing like the amount of power they have available.

As a consequence, PC power supplies have wide variations in efficiency, from between a low of 20 per cent and a high of 90 per cent. Google's aim is to create a standard efficiency of 80 per cent.

The NY Times quotes Chris Calwell, director for policy and research at Ecos Consulting as stating that there was 'overprovisioning', in modern PC power supplies. 'It's like putting a 400-horsepower engine in every car, just because some cars have to tow large trailers every once in a while, Mr. Calwell said.

The Google paper, 'High-Efficiency Power Supplies for Home Computers and Servers' by Urs Hölzle and William Weihl, says that modern PC designs have transferred the control of voltage to the motherboards, making the multiple voltage requirements of industry standard power supplies unnecessary and a danger to the environment.

The Google paper points out that by fitting the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC's each running eight hours a day, it will save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion from electricity bills, at Californian prices.

One of the principle beneficiaries of such a move would be Google itself. The so-called 'Googleplex' that carries out the millions of search requests the company receives every day is a warehouse stacked with cheap PCs - together running up a sizable power bill each year.