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Don't bother designing green anymore?

Catwell
Beside saving power consumption in a design, does anyone "think green" in their designs whatsoever?

Perhaps I'm in the minority, but usually making a green product comes after I've finished the concept. Then I just crowbar as much "green" in as I can into the system without jeopardizing functionality. Perhaps I should start with the goal of protecting the environment, and build around that idea.
 
Often I am stuck between deadlines and virtues. At one moment, I've been asked to explain why I am off schedule. And another moment I have to sit through a department head lecture about his latest whim to "design green," and explain why I haven't done that either.
 
A new environmental design methodology I can read about anywhere?
 
C
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    Hi  all,

     

    I  agree with hesener on the fact that there are still a lot  of old school electrical applications that consume way too much power (although  they may be cleverly marketed as energy efficient, green, alternative etc)

     

    However,  I'd also like to further add that a lot  has changed since the last decade when it comes to microprocessor design and manufacturing, where this  issue seems to have been taken quite  seriously. Gone are the days of the  'MHz wars' when every processor vendor would invent notorious ways of increasing  the clock frequency without any particular concern over power consumption. In  many cases, the actual increase in throughput with regards to the increase in  clock frequency was insignificant. In a famous keynote speech in the mid-90s,  Pat Gelsinger (of Intel) astonished everyone by stating that if this trend was  to continue then in 15 years time the W/cm2 of a microprocessor die would be  similar to that of the sun's outer surface. A lot has changed since then.  Fabrication technology has improved and new materials are being used to combat  leakage power. Clockgaters have been introduced into the designs to ensure that  any unused part of the microprocessor is switched off. New novel low power  architectures (ARM, MIPS) are widely used in 8, 16, 32 bit MCUs/MPUs which are  even breaking into the computer server market.

     

    Datacenters/Clusters  were (and are still) considered to be massive power hungry monsters, which drove  the datacenter managers nuts with their electricity bills. The cost of  maintainance and air-cooling outweighed the computing costs by a factor of 2 ~  3. This scenario has significantly changed with the advent of cloud computing.  This has meant that application workloads are not tied to any physical machine  and can be distributed or moved from one machine to the other. In other words,  computing resource can be dynamically scheduled depending on the size of the  workload.

     

    So,  don't know whether I have moved away from the topic but 'designing green' is  definately on and here to stay!

  • 0 in reply to een5afr

    Take a look at the slew of blog posts in the Alternative Energy group. It seems like the technology push in that section is increasing rapidly. From students to large companies, everyone has green on the mind these days.

     

    Cabe

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