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Server Power Consumption Doubled Over Past 5 years
Watt's up writes "A new study shows an alarming increase in server power consumption over the past five years. In the US, servers (including cooling equipment) consumes 1.2% of all the electricity in 2005, up from 0.6% in 2000. The trend is similar worldwide. 'If current trends continue, server electricity usage will jump 40 percent by 2010, driven in part by the rise of cheap blade servers, which increase overall power use faster than larger ones. Virtualization and consolidation of servers will work against this trend, though, and it's difficult to predict what will happen as data centers increasingly standardize on power-efficient chips." We also had a recent discussion of power consumption in consumer PCs that you might find interesting.
As one of the founders of Google pointed out about 3 months ago, most if not all the compnents in a PC could be designed to run off a common voltage. The only reasons they don't are historical.
That's not what the Google paper said. It proposed that power supplies should output only 12V and motherboards should contain many DC-DC converters to generate voltages needed by chips. As chip fabrication technology changes, newer chips need lower voltages to operate optimally (not to mention that lower voltage = lower power); since different chips in a computer are made with different technologies, they need different voltages ranging from 1.8V down to 1.0V.
You got it; that's how telco central offices work and a few companies are proposing that other data centers should switch to DC. But there are many problems: low-voltage DC requires thicker cables than high-voltage AC, I've heard that high-voltage DC can only be plugged in by licensed electricians, and AFAIK there is no standard DC connector. And industry intertia, of course.