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Google Calls For Power Supply Design Changes
Raindance writes "The New York Times reports that Google is calling 'for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of the new power supply would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiencies ... The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense — by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC's running eight hours a day, it will be possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California's energy rates.' This may have something to do with the electricity bill for Google's estimated 450,000 servers."
n/m found it.
t e_paper.pdf
http://services.google.com/blog_resources/PSU_whi
If you look at just routing 12 volts everywhere, you just would have to put the regulators in the hard drives, and CDROMS so they don't need 3.3 and 5 volts. Then what do you do about +5 Stanby that allows you to hibernate? Do you still need a stand by voltage? It isn't and easy answer and will take the whole industry to adopt it. Checkout formfactors.org for ATX and BTX specifications that Intel is pushing. What's also interesting is the 600 and 700, etc Watt power supplies just keep their 3.3 and 5 volts at around 30 amps max, but keep adding +12V1 +12V2 +12V3, etc.. Looks like the industry is already going to mostly 12 volts for distribution anyway. But don't you still need PS_ON, PowerOK, etc.. You're just trying to phase out the +5 and +3.3, and -12 which hardly any motherboards use these days, and maybe the +5 Standby, then it's going to happen eventually anyway. Most of the power is going on the 12 volt lines anyway, so having inefficient +3.3 and +5 isn't really a big deal. I've studied this for a while as my big hobby is computers in cars, I built a power supply called DSX12V that takes a 8-16 volt input and makes a solid 12v output that I got over 97% efficiency on. This is good for people sticking computers in cars or running them off banks of batteries for solar power applications etc.