A Green Chip On Your Shoulder?
by Karin Kloosterman, Tel Aviv 
on 11.16.07
We've written about Intel's Penryn chip before: it is fast, sleek, small and now green. According to 21c, Intel released the new chipset last Saturday and Israeli labs in Haifa helped fashion its micro-architecture to make the chip feasible at a commercial scale.
Is the Penryn now the greenest computer chip in the world?
"These are the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years," Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said.
Penryn reduces power leakage which normally manifests itself in a processor unit as heat, with the new hafnium-based chips measuring a mere 45 nanometers each - so small, that is, that more than two million could fit onto the period at the end of this sentence.That doesn't leave much room for energy loss - making the Penryn, in Intel's phrase, the "coolest" processor technology to date.
The company also has replaced lead-based components with tin, copper and silver alloys. It is also set to remove halogen based materials, which can generate ozone-damaging gases.
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It's a wonderful chip. It uses less power than the previous generation. It is lead free... but how is it "green"? It still uses a lot of power. It still has to be manufactured. If you want to be green, recycle an "old" computer or buy one that is specifically low power. Labeling it "green" is rather dishonest.
yeah, chips are amazing creations that can switch stuff at billions of times a second, and work flawlessly for decades....
but if it's obsolete in 2-3 years then it was pretty much a waste of energy manufacturing it
Er... 45 nm is the geometry of the parts on the chip, not the size of the chip.
My instincts are with Tony on this one, although I also am inclined to admit that for many, many mainstream computer users (read: non-treehuggers), this chip is a (small) step in the right direction. For those who may not have heard of it, AMD has made similar strides (their low-power CPU powers the OLPC's laptop (laptop.org), as has ASUS, at least in theory.
The sad truth is that Intel, for all its wealth and power, is taking these steps very, very slowly and grudgingly. This was demanded by businesses for servers first to reduce heating and electricity costs, and the trickle-down is now being felt in the consumer chip segment.
I love the idea of a green chip. Sounds awesome.
But speaking of green computing, Another great way of going green for PCs is to look into a company called Userful. They can turn one ordinary PC box into ten workstations with their linux created desktop software. I've used their software and I couldn't be happier! Don't hold your breath for Windows or mac to do this anytime soon. Check these guys out - http://www.userful.com