Sharing some of the ingredients & spells from my Grimoire …
Recently, we have been seeing lots of energy-efficient products entering our lives, the change has been triggered by factors like rising oil prices, increase in environmental pollution and soaring electricity costs. There has been a significant shift towards energy efficient computers, especially in the data centers.
Centaur semiconductors have come up with a very interesting way of evaluating the energy efficiency of micoprocessor products. It is called the TreeMark™ Tree Rating. Centaur defines it as “The number of trees that need to be planted to counter the amount of carbon dioxide created as a by-product of the electricity generated to power the processor over its operational lifetime”. The good thing is, Centaur’s processors rate very well on this benchmark when compared with their Intel or AMD counterparts.
I still keep on wondering what would be the TreeMark rating for the components other than the processor in a computer. If a processor’s TreeMark rating is 7 trees, the rest of the electronics in the computer could raise the bar by 14-20 more trees. Not to mention the amount of thermal cooling required in the datacenters.
The situation demands more involvement in the process of creating energy efficient compute appliances on part of the industry leaders. I would like to mention the good work done by IBM for the Power6 Processor.
The figure below shows how the TreeMark Tree rating can be calculated for an electrical load.
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