Intel Releases Several Projects to Help Save Power

GeekyBodhi writes "LessWatts.org is Intel's new website that hosts several power saving tools. As Linux.com reports, it also shares tips and tricks to help optimize power consumption on hardware from portable devices running on batteries to large data centers. 'LessWatts.org is not about marketing, trying to sell you something or comparing one vendor to another. LessWatts.org is about how you can save real watts, however you use Linux on your computer or computers.' As reported on Slashdot earlier, this isn't the first time Intel has tried to help Linux users cut their power bills. In May, the company launched the PowerTOP program that monitors individual processes to keep track of power consumption. The project comes at a time when more vendors are pre-installing Linux on handhelds and laptops." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

Comments

less?

[Anonymous Coward]

LessPower.org was taken... so they settled on LessWatts.org?

Actually, they registered FewerWatts.org, too... and pointed it at LessWatts.org!

Surely someone involved in this project took a grammar class, and could point out that it should be the other way around.

Fewer Watts

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be fewer Watts? Less Watts would mean less of Mr. Watts. Gee, at lest get the grammar right! They could say less wattage.

powertop...

[PaintyThePirate]

It looks to me like it's just a relaunched version of Intel Powertop with better marketing behind it.

Regardless, Powertop actually is a useful tool, and it's helped me get much better battery life out of my T61 running Ubuntu.

Re:powertop...

[PaintyThePirate]

Err, a relaunched version of the Powertop site, that is. The program itself remains unchanged.

for desktop, power supply is biggest waste

[bzipitidoo]

I'd read cheap power supplies can waste upwards of 4/5 the energy converted to DC. Fixing that is way more savings than any OS or PC tweaking. An effort by Google (pdf warning) was mentioned on Slashdot a while ago.

Re:for desktop, power supply is biggest waste

[houstonbofh]

There is a lot of good info on Toms Hardware Guide. A PSU listed as 'high efficiency' is %75 efficient. Toms showed several at %85 or better. And some as low as %60. And that is on total power, so big gains here.

Re:for desktop, power supply is biggest waste

[bcrowell]

The efficiency of power supplies is also non-linear. They only peak when under a fair load. If a switching supply is minimally loaded, its efficiency is very bad (50%).

You'll find a variety of statements about this running around on the web. It's true that a switching power supply is a wildly nonlinear device (which is why, for example, you can't test it without a load). But there's no simple, reliable rule for when it will be most efficient. You'll hear some people saying a PS is most efficient when used near 100% of its rated capacity, and others who say 50%. Some usenet folks did systematic measurements (you can probably turn up the thread on google groups, I don't have it handy), and they found that basically none of these statements was generally true. There was no clear relationship between % load and efficiency that held true across a variety of power supplies. When people say that it's most efficient when almost 100% loaded (I know, you didn't say that, but other people do), there are two things to keep in mind: (a) it's not necessarily true, and (b) even if it was, you wouldn't want to design your system so that it used almost 100% of the PS's rated power. What typically happens if your PS is on the ragged edge of having enough power for your system is that you get random failures to boot which are hard to reproduce. The reason is that booting tends to require a lot of power (spinning up the drives, running the CPU full-out), and may go over what the PS can supply.

The main thing is to get an 80PLUS power supply. Not only can you be sure it will be efficient, but it won't contain any lead.

What Intel is doing seems laudable, but it seems like it's likely to be a very time-consuming way for an individual to cut one watt off of their system's power consumption. You want to pick the low-hanging fruit first. Get a power consumption meter such as a kill-a-watt, and take some measurements. I used to have a pair of speakers that drew 12 W, even when the computer was off, and I didn't know it. If you've got a CRT, replace it with an LCD. Another big issue is doing your word processing on a machine with a video card that gets hot enough to fry an egg on.

The other big issue on Linux is poor support for power management. There are some success stories, such as the fact that the kernel automagically supports AMD cool'n'quiet, but in general, there are serious problems with sleep and hibernation on linux, and the reason is that manufacturers of peripherals refuse to publicly release the documentation for all the registers that need to be saved in order to restore their states when the machine wakes back up. Personally, I've never had any luck with sleep or hibernation on any machine I've ever installed linux on.

Re:trust them?

[Wesley Felter]

PowerTop does use a physical power meter: the battery in your laptop.

Grammar

[AdamWill]

If they'd bothered running the site name past someone passingly familiar with the rules of English before going live, it'd be called FewerWatts. sigh.

Re:Interesting question...

[grotgrot]

I did on my dual boot laptop (Lenovo T61). Under Windows with no tuning etc, all radios on, power consumption was 12W. Under the latest Gutsy (32 bit tickless kernel) with no tweaking and same screen brightness consumption was 18W. Turning off the physical radio switch reduced consumption by 1W. Doing all the powertop suggested tweaks brought things down by another watt. (Incidentally there wasn't much difference between the 32 bit tickless kernel and the 64bit tickfull kernel suggesting that most power consumption is in the various peripherals and devices).

Basically Windows consumed significantly less power than Linux (about 30-40% less). From the lesswatts site it is good to see that more power saving will be in the Linux kernel in the 2.6.24/25 timeframe (eg SATA power saving) as well as user space (eg not polling SATA cdroms every 2 seconds looking for media changes). I guess we'll be seeing those updates in Hardy Heron.