World o' data centers burns less juice than expected Thanks to a poor economy, the more aggressive use of virtualization, and the rise of more efficient iron, the world's data centers are consuming less energy than expected, according to a new report from one prominent Stanford University researcher. In early 2007, Jonathan Koomey – a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley …
I guess what he didn't see coming was the Intel core architecture. In 2005 the highly clocked Netburst was running supreme burning 90->135 watts per core (Xeon) while now the same thermal envelope offers 12 cores each with much more power than the Xeons of yesteryear.
All hail ChipZilla! since they are at least partly responsible for this with their more energy efficient kit.
It's funny that if this guy had looked around and spoken to industry insiders his predictions would have made much more sense because he wouldn't have estimated increased juice consumption per machine like he did. I guess this is another case of 20/20 hindsight.
Anyone care to speculate whether the next architecture change will be more or less power efficient?
Quite simply he got it wrong by not taking into account fairly obvious commercial pressures to reduce operating costs. It's always a mistake to perform an extrapolation without realising that suppliers adapt. We can look at a close parallel with the use of fuel for transport - there are commercial pressures on manufacturers to reduce fuel consumption hence, rather than go up, total fuel consumption in the UK has declined.
In the case of IT equipment there is still a lot of scope to reduce the total power requirements through better basic technology and improved management.
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