Slashdot Mirror
NEC Launches "PowerMate Eco" Green PC
jdstahl writes "NEC has just released the PowerMate Eco, billed as the world's first environmentally-friendly PC. Based on a 900 MHz Transmeta Crusoe (thanks Linus!), it is ultra-compact, ultra low power, and nearly silent. Its motherboard contains no lead, and the case is made from recycled plastic. Its expandability is limited, so this is probably not a geek-box, but it seems like an appealing choice for Joe Desktop."
They're trying to fix that, but noncausal code-morphing has proven to be diffucult to implement.
Sounds like marketing FUD to me
Not all lies are FUD. FUD is fear, uncertainty, and doubt. When MS says the GPL is a virus that will infect all your source code, that is FUD. If I say my widget will process 3 trillion zonks per second and was made entirely from recycled used toilet paper, it may be a lie, but it isn't FUD.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The second generation of iMacs were fanless. Running with the G3 chip and convection cooling allowed Apple to ditch the fan and make an (almost) silent computer. The new iMac G4 does have a fan, but it is fairly quiet and energy-efficent in its own right.
jrbd
Much of the Crusoe's power savings can be attributed simply to not trying to push the performance curve so far. IIRC, Intel responded to Transmeta's products by putting out a slower, power optimized Pentium-III that was almost as frugal as the Crusoe. This was done with mainly with process tweaks and underclocking.
The spec says it requires 18V DC at 4.44 amps. I believe that works out to about 80 watts. So then assuming your saving about 200 watts over a conventional computer then
200 watts * 160 hours per month = 32 kWh
Electricity goes for about 8 cents per kWh so you save about $2.56 per month. Even if you have the machine for 5 years you only save $153.
If Joe Desktop wants a cheap box thats going to use low power then the VIA Eden boards are much more credible platforms.
Not only are they low power but you can get cheap mostly metal cases (in black too) and they are almost silent, including an option of no CPU fan.
Finally as sites like www.mini-itx.com show you can recycle insane things like bread bins, sparc ipx's and even a nes as cases for them
X86 is just inefficient, and that causes CPU power consumption to go up.
That statement is wrong on both counts.
CISC and VLIW can be far more power efficient than RISC because the large instruction is executed with special hardware, rather than emulated by lots of little RISC instructions.
Power in the architecture goes up when you try to get fancier and fancier with caching, prediction, and parallel execution to get the most out of any instruction set.
Crusoe get's its power gains (or losses) from slowing itself down or sleeping alot. Crusoe is also lower power because it sacrifices a lot of performance. But this point was beaten to death years ago.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Media Access Control, the second layer of Ethernet. 48 Bit adressing system dealing on small scales.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
The problem is, it "feels" slow. There's just this little bit of latency, particularly as something starts up for the first time
It is very unlikely that you can really notice the speed of code morphing. It seems much more likely that you have a very slow laptop hard disk.
Stuff your laptop full of memory; put as much in as it will hold. Then see if it feels better. Things will still be slow, as they load from disk, but once they are loaded they should be much faster.
This is especially important if you are running a RAM hog of an OS such as Windows XP. When your system is low on memory it swaps some memory pages out to your hard disk; swapping to a slow laptop disk will be painful.
Also, if you have XP or Windows ME, be sure to turn "system restore" off!
Maybe someday you can install Linux on it; I would be interested to know if Linux feels any better.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And most impressive: it's got a solid-metal case that's much more recyclable than any plastic, and costs one-eighth ($200) what the "Green PC" does ($1600).