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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."
google hires experts on Electrical Engineering to figure out how to reduce the power bill on those 450,000 servers. Hell, I'm all for it. Less power means less heat means quieter fans (w/o spending an arm/leg on an Antec Sonata or whathaveyou).
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In the old days, disk drive motors and fans. But many of these now run on 5V, hence the cheap USB-powered drive cases out there. Chips at CMOS power levels run at 3.3v, TTL is 5v, but hardly anything runs at 12v anymore. It seems to me that if they'd just pick their hardware carfully, they could run their entire server rack off of 5v+- rails.
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I assume Google is employing some smart electrical engineers, which are more than qualified to make this kind of recommendations I would think...
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Its a nice idea and one that is probably a long time coming, but phasing something like that into place will take an incredibly long time. Look at the struggles of PCI express, its still not in 50% of the newer motherboards and systems though its benefits are more than apparent. Its just been in the past couple years that we have seen a shift to full usb and most machines still come with ps2, serial and parallel ports anyway. Dramatic changes to the PC standards are very difficult, there are millions of existing machines that still need support. Perhaps if it was tied to a new socket standard in the future it could slowly be phased in through upgrades, but I see the chances as very very slim.
I would bet a lot of the employees at Google have Electrical Engineering degrees. Don't underestimate the brain power Google has in its employee base. But the power supply issue they're trying to address isn't a technical challenge, but a political challenge.
The ability to have all my machines powered by a heavy cable carrying 12VDC would be pretty useful for several reasons.
*sigh*
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Why? I can turn 12VDC into 5VDC (what USB uses) with nothing more than a voltage regulator (or if you want to waste a ton of power, a relatively trivial voltage divider).
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I have been saying this for years. We lose 10-20 % of energy charging a battery in a UPS with 117V, we lose another 20-30% in the inverter to get it back to 117V, and then we lose another 10% getting the 117V back to usable voltages for the PC.
It does not take an expert in electrical engineering, just common sense.
Can I sue google for stealing my idea?
Bruce
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Many recent motherboard use 12V to control voltage regulators' MOSFETs gates because the higher the voltage, the lower the internal resistance, so the higher the efficiency. 5V is generally too low to achieve good efficiency, but 12V is fine.
From 12V, the MB can produce 3.3V and 1.xxx Volt for the CPU. It's easy to also provide 5V on the MB.
Not quite on topic but..
It amazes me that so few people realize that a "nominal" 24V is the norm for all manufacturing. Just about EVERY manufacturing plant has 24V throughout the facility, they may (or may not) also have 120/240, but they WILL have 24V - amps and amps of the stuff.
This means there's a full range of 24V equipment, millions of devices. 24V PC's, 24V hubs/switch and all the other infrastructure as well as specialized industrial controllers, etc. etc..
There's some logic behind this that doesn't related to power saving, mainly that you really have to work at doing yourself serious injury with 24V, but you can still pull enough power to run things (like PCs).
Having this low voltage standard is very useful, but before we consider adding another, how about just considering using the one that already exists.
Isn't -48 still 48Volts of differential, so why not just +48V? I'm no EE, so I'm obviously missing something here.
Serial remains one of the most manageable approaches to console management. Video is, obviously, not loggable, not automatically monitorable, not greppable, and not amenable to low throughput, high latency remote access.. Serial devices and consequently drivers for them are so simple and straightforward, and the behavior so deterministic, that it is far preferable to something more complex (ethernet and usb) for a console. Ethernet certainly in questionable circumstances may suggest a driver unload/reload as a step to problem resolution, which is safer if not using as a console (though many times I have used ssh and chained the commands using semicolons). For example in that case, if your path contains an nfs mount, and you forget about it as you yank the network out, your chained command will hang as the shell tries to stat the nfs mount for the path. Part of the problem with relying solely upon the ethernet for console is the ethernet has more than one job to do, so it takes a fair amount more competent engineering to get to work right. Many newer systems offer to redirect textual serial traffic over IPMI, and that is admittedly decent *if* the vendor architects it robustly, which is difficult to ensure beyond hands-on experience with a brand and trusting in their consistancy. For example, e326 servers from IBM I wouldn't trust the net console, but an IBM x3455 I would be more confident in. USB, again, has similar complexity issues (it's multiplexed for keyboard/mouse/mass/storage/printing/scanning/etc etc). If you theoretically had bi-directional text console over some usb device, it's more difficult for a low level, simple piece of software to set up the usb controller and all requisite activities, then traverse the bus, identify the console devices, and then use it. Just like with an ethernet device where you may have cause to unload and reload a driver, a usb controller out to lunch with respect to a mass storage device would cause a similar issue. Enterprise distribution kernels tend to compile in the serial console and leave the usb controller modular, specifically with serial consoles in mind.
Serial console servers, in answer to your question, provide a scalable way for systems to access via the network serial consoles. By being dedicated, moderately simple systems with 40+ serial cables, they can provide access (via telnet generally) to a rack's worth of 1U servers, automatically log the content, or at the very least provide an administrator with remote console access at will to any given system.
Serial console is not obsolete in the least bit, just because it can't run your '31337' aero interface, or whatever nice and shiny interface that makes poser administrators and PHBs drool, doesn't mean good, serious systems administrators don't consider the technology to be a vital part of a robust management strategy.
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if you have to re-convert anyway, 5V as intermediate voltage is not optimal. When converting to 5V, the voltage drop in the power diodes and in the wires to the mainboard eats a much higher proportion of the power than with 12V as intermediate voltage. 24V or even 48V would be even better.
Telephony has been running on redundant -48V DC supplies to the racks (typically from rooms full of floating storage batteries) since the early relay days. Much modern networking equipment also conforms to this standard, so it can be used in such racks with no local power supply (except the per-card isolation diodes and downconverters).
Power conversion modules running from 48V are in volume production.
Why does Google want to reinvent this wheel?
(However, if they do insist on using 12v, I hope they make it able to work from 11.75v to about 15V, with glitches, and shut off at stable levels below 11.75v. That way such boards could be used directly with 12v renewable energy systems, plugged directly into an automobile "cigarette lighter" power outlet, or easily wired into a vehicle or travel trailer as an appliance.)
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There are over 6500 Walmart stores with an average size of 120000 square feet. Every 500 sqaure feet they have a 4-tube fluorescent light fixture, drawing 4x40 or 160 watts. Multiplying out, the total square footage is ~6500*120000=780,000,000 square feet. Divide by 500 square feet to get the total number of fixtures, 1,560,000, and multiply that by 160 watts to get the total watts, 249,600,000. Probably 75% of those Walmart stores are 24 hour, while the rest are 12 hour: (.75*24)+(.25*12) = 21 average hours
.068 = $130,096,512 per year in electricity.
Total Watts x Avg hours x 365 days per year = Wh per year
249,600,000W x 21h x 365d = 1,913,184,000,000 Wh per year
Wh/1000 (kWh) x the going rate (approximately 6.8 cents nationwide)
1,913,184,000 x
If they took out one tube per fixture, they would save $32,524,128 per year.
*This doesn't include the parking lots, which have a similar consumption.
So, what's the point? There are other, easier ways to save a lot of power. I'm glad Google wants to change the computer world, but what about replacing 10% of the incandescent bulbs with fluorescents and save 50W x 10,000,000,000? Or just TURN OFF your computer when you aren't using it! Retooling the entire industry would cost MORE than it would save in power. That's not to say I don't agree that we need to start making a lot of little changes and this is as good a place as any. But the benefits are very far in the future, when we run out of oil. Not now.
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