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Intel To Make A Greener Microprocessor
crem_d_genes writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Intel is planning microprocessors that have a reduced amount of lead in them (reportedly 95% lower). It's about time a company started this - good job - and let's hope other tech companies take the hint. While many places in the US have banned the disposal of computer parts, there have been unintended consequences of the eco-friendly laws. Many 'recycled' computers currently get shipped overseas where parts eventually make their ways into the hands of workers who usually 'burn' the parts to get rid of plastic and recover small amounts of valuable metals. In the process they are exposed to the toxic compounds that are released. In other cases, lead makes its way into drinking water."
Excellent idea.
Next step: reduce power consumption.
There not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Some countries (Japan) are phasing in laws that chips be made lead free. Otherwise, the can't be sold there. A Pb-free chip only cost 1-3 dollars more than otherwise in my experience... (consumer electronics ASICs)
Uhh, is the editor talking about the same company that requires 103W for the latest and greatest processor they have to offer?
I'm wondering what would happen if all manufacturers of electronic equipment were required to provide a 5-year warranty on all their products. Anyone think it would reduce the amount of cheap electronic stuff that ends up in the garbage after a week and contributes to pollution?
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Quote from the article:
"The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker, the world's biggest, said it is working with the rest of the industry to remove the remaining amount of lead that's needed to connect the processor's core with its packaging."
I read this and think solder. Anyone know what else they would use?
/uses lead as a paperweight
If you think that even a 95% decrease in the lead in the microprocessor would have as much as 0.1% impact on the amount of lead in a desktop computer, think again! The lead in the solder on the boards and in the power supply is a far greater factor than the very small amount of lead in a CPU. Sure, you can say "any decrease is an improvement", and maybe it even really is (that depends an awful lot on what the lead is replaced with though), but don't let let yourself be fooled by someone pointing at the CPU and calling attention to it while the Intel chip is not the real problem.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
A large fraction of the transistors in a x86 processor are there allow backward compatibility with all the previous x86's, down to the 8086 processor.
Question:
Intel to Reduce Chips' Lead Content ?
Answer:
For environmental reasons, Intel Corp. plans to reduce the amount of lead in its microprocessors and chip sets by 95 percent starting this year.
Real Answer:
A European Union directive requires manufacturers to ban the use of six specified hazardous substances, including lead, after July 2006
My question:
So how much of lead is there actually in a microprocessor/flash? 95% reduction is great, but without an actual number a comparison is pointless.
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Now I've never cracked open a monitor so I don't know if they really contain 8 lbs of lead, but where is all this lead in a PC? The entire motherboard can't weigh more than a pound or two so that's not it. The case? No, that's sheet metal. Is it in the hard drive? Average mid-tower PC probably doesn't weigh much more than 8 lbs total so I can't imagine where all this lead is at.
Also monitors are rarely thrown out. I've gone through about half a dozen PCs but kept the same monitor. They're just too freaking useful, even old 14" monitors are great for a second PC and still easily sell on eBay. Are these broken monitors people are tossing out?
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actually, they are required to do this if they intend to keep selling chips in europe and japan. a recent group of laws in the EU (or is it some individual EU countries, i'm not sure) and Japan require that consumer electronics be nearly lead-free, both in the final product and in the manufacturing process. this includes PCB's and integrated circuits. most manufacturing operations, and any electronics makers that want to do business outside of north america, have been transitioning to lead-free products recently.
intel is meeting its upcoming legal requirements. the real win here (for intel), is turning something they are legally obligated to do into an "environmentally friendly" pr victory. the news media seems to be eating it up.
Ist This is Intel, so we are talking only about the processor and other chips, not the whole machine? Vast majority of lead is soldering to the motherboard and other printed circuits - outside Intel's control.
2nd You won't stop 3rd world countries trying to kill themselves. A colleague of mine once worked for a crane company who sold to India, among other places. He went out there to check the new installation of a new crane once and found they had removed all the hand rails around ladders and platforms etc and sold them for scrap! You cannot impose western standards on these places.
3rd Not just 3rd world countries. I work as a safety engineer and anyone, even supposedly "sensible" workers within my own industry (they have to pass various aptitude tests here), have limitless imagination in devising new ways to try to kill themselves. Only constant monitoring and supervision stops them from doing so. We can only leave 3rd world countries to regulate themselves.
4th Sounds like a publicity gesture by Intel to me. "Lead" is one of those trigger words which switches people into self-righteous mode. These gestures always seem to work - even among people of above average knowledge and intelligence. Just watch the posters here for example.
Now, where's that asbestos suit.
Read the title for your reduced power consumption chips, which should be hitting the desktop within a few months or so. Banias is just wiping the floors with any competitors battery-life and speed wise, and their greatest competitor is actually themselves; those god awful Celeron notebooks with 30 minute battery lifes. But what's cheap usually outsells what's new.
I fully believe that Pentium V (Pentium 5, whichever they choose to call it), will be Dothan, introducing to the desktop for the first time a power-saving logic. Not only does this make sense for quieter, smaller computing (two of the biggest buzzfactors on the market right now; those micro cases and motherboards are selling like wildfire), it makes for cheaper, faster computing. I believe that the cluncky Pentium 4M will be dropped altogether, and the Pentium 4 technology (Tejas, the last NetBurst Archetecture chip I know of) will be integrated into the Xeon line to run head on verses the AMD64 chips (hince, the reason they're adding in the x86-64 extensions to that processor).
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There always is a risk that first generations of such environmentally-friendly products have some kind of malfunction, and need to be returned and replaced. This has happened in several cases, including in the semiconductor industry.
Probably the dump of failed environmentally-friendly but useless products damages the environment more than the originally replaced product.
I would wait for the second generation of such a processor before buying it myself or recommending to buy a lot of them at work. For me, the amount of lead that could be in a single processor and could be saved in the next, is not worth the risk of having it fail.
Actually, intel is moving away from measuring chip speed by GHZ. Wired just had this article about it.
Basically, Intel is a couple years behind AMD who is now using numbers like 2300+ to describe chip speed.
The difference here is this: AMD's numbers were intended for comparison with a P4; for example, an Athlon 2600+ is supposed to be roughly equal to a P4-2.6 GHz. And to AMD's credit, most benchmarks showed that they were quite generous to Intel.
Intel designed the P4 to do less work per clock, but at a much higher potential clock. Thus even a P-III would out-do a P4 for the same clock frequency. Whether this was a marketing decision or not, I don't know...
Point being, Intel is getting away from clock-speed ratings for different reasons. I personally think that it's because demand has gone down significantly. Computers are today more than fast enough for almost everything the average user wants to do. Even I don't really need a faster machine at this point, and I write software...
So the market isn't going to be driven by faster CPUs. Most of my family won't buy a new PC based solely on that. But if the new machine was smaller, quieter, and more power-efficient, that might be incentive to upgrade (again, even I would probably go for that if it were at least as fast as my current PC).
It's all about market demand. For the last few years, consumers demanded faster CPU speeds; this has changed, and the smarter companies in this industry are changing as well.
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Anyways, if Intel can get away from clock-speed ratings, I hope it can get away from 100 watt processors. Where are the quiet and efficient Pentium M desktop systems? Some companies are designing motherboards for them, but there isn't anything easily available. I'm typing this on a 1.3GHz Celeron system (the 1GHz VIA C3 was just a little too slow, crippled by its tiny cache and weak FPU...I'm using the same near-silent heatsink setup as before, and getting 38 degrees versus 32), but a Pentium M would be ideal for a quiet but powerful general-purpose system.
GHz IMO is at least a little more honest when it comes to Intel Processors because the IPC (instructions per clock) shouldnt change all that much from a 2.0GHz CPU to a 2.2 GHz CPU, whereas the instructions per clock on a 2600+ CPU can be drastically different from that of a 2700+ (in fact, it can be a whole different core).
And therein lies the major problem with GHz-based speed comparisons. As long as you're dealing with the same core (which is not the same as processor name i.e. "Pentium 4",) the speed will scale rather linearily with core speed (ignoring bus speeds etc.)
But you simply can't compare an N-GHz processor with core X to an N-GHz processor with core Y. The problem is, there really is no objective measurement system, as of yet, anyway.
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AMD fanboys listen up: Yeah, you guys are winning the strongarm race right now. You've got the faster middle-class processor (upper end desktop/lower- to medium-end server) and Intel knows this quite well. They could scale Prescott very quickly up, but so would come heat, and therefore energy prices.
AMD has the faster high-end processors, too. I just ordered a high-end workstation for modeling and simulation at work. I chose a 64-bit AMD CPU both for the speed it gives now as well as for the future growth potential. Server guys are demaning AMDs and you'll probably even see the Intel-only Dell start offering AMD-based servers.
Intel has no concern about energy prices and the only reason that they care about heat is because they would need liquid nitrogen cooling to draw off the heat if their CPUs ran much hotter. Their other big concern about heat is that manufacturers can't create reliable 1U racks with CPUs that pull 100+ watts. There is also the issue of building power supplies which have amperages that approach those of arc-welders (yes, I know the voltage is not the same). And there is the issue of carrying that much current through PCB traces.
Now, lets look at other moves Intel's made lately. They've announced they're going to a PR-rating for selling processors.
But when AMD did that, Intel screamed that it was deceptive (which was, itself, ironic coming from a company selling GHZ specs to ignorant consumers).
So, I'm very sure that this is one of the top priorities sitting on the desks of Intel Engineers, I applaud them for taking every step towards a cleaner environment while making my newest tech gadgets.
I'll believe that Intel has an interest in the environment when they stop trying to convince consumers to throw their existing PCs into landfills and to upgrade to light-dimming 3GHZ P4s for websurfing on their AOL dial-up connections. I'll believe that Intel has an interest in the environment when their desktop chipsets have built-in CPU speed throttling to save power (do you think that you need a 3GHZ CPU for word processing?). All that Intel is doing now is complying with upcoming EU regulations regarding lead.
It's about time a company started this - good job - and let's hope other tech companies take the hint.
Hello, wake up call. This is a major industry trend. Intel is following along. They're definately not the ones starting this, in hopes the rest of the industry will catch on. It is a European Union Directive that deserves the "good job" credit... and it is Intel and every other major manufacturer in the electronics industry that is "taking the hint".
Most new electronic components are being made with little or no lead. Major companies and contract manufacturers (who solder boards for most smaller companies) are switching to lead-free soldering processes.
Already this forum is filled with +5 comments about power consumption and how the solder contains much more lead than the chips. Well, here's the news... the whole industry is migrating to lead-free solder.
Much of the conversion is driven by an EU directive that all electronic products sold in Europe be lead-free by 2008.
Here's an EE Times Article about the trend, and a possibility that the deadline may be moved up to 2006.
I am an electrical engineer, and even at the US-based company where I used to work, they're having to go through the painful process of switching the wave solder and reflow ovens (surface mount soldering) to lead-free fluxes and solder alloys.
So give credit where credit is due. It's the European Union, not Intel, that deserves "good job". The whole industry is taking the hint, as selling or being able to sell in the EU is important to almost everybody.
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