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Google Demands Higher Chip Temps From Intel
JagsLive writes "When purchasing server processors directly from Intel, Google has insisted on a guarantee that the chips can operate at temperatures five degrees centigrade higher than their standard qualification, according to a former Google employee. This allowed the search giant to maintain higher temperatures within its data centers, the ex-employee says, and save millions of dollars each year in cooling costs."
I'm not sure what your getting at - if by doing this they are saving millions in cooling expense, they are certainly using less energy. What is "going green" if it isn't energy conservation? The fact that the conservation comes from less work for their AC units rather than efficient little processors is immaterial.
Don't expect any company to do things because its right - but good companies will find win-win situations where they cut costs and do things to "Go Green".
Overclockers
Wouldn't Intel run into physical limitations
Google is most likely getting the best chips out of Intel's standard production. It's akin to sorting out the best bananas at the grocery store. This sort of privilege happens when you buy enough products from a supplier.
If they were demanding much more than 5 degrees then I would say they are getting custom made chips, but I don't think that's the case.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Two words: "Free Cooling"
The greater the difference between your data centre's output air temperature and whatever passive external cooling system you are pumping it though, the more heat you can dump at zero cost. That's monetary cost as well as the cost to the environment through the energy "wasted" in HVAC systems and the like. Google has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness; the ratio of power input to power acutally used for powering production systems) approaching 1.2 vs typical values of around 2.5-3.0 - Microsoft is around 2.75 as I recall - so they are clearly doing something right.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I'm surprised Google isn't considering moving some of its data centres to Arctic locations where you get cool temperatures year-round.
Oh yeah! And completely melt the ice cap.
What?
"Guarantee us a higher temp CPU or we will switch to AMD...and tell everyone about it."
That's not really how the negotiation goes in this type of situation where there are two major supplier choices (AMD and Intel) and Google is a relatively small customer when compared with Dell, HP, IBM, etc.
In all likelihood, the negotiation is more of a partnership where both parties work together to create value. Google says, "We buy thousands upon thousands of your chips, but we also pay millions of dollars annually to cool them. We'd be willing to pay little premium and lock in more volume if you can help us save money by increasing the temperature inside our data centers." Google has done the math and comes prepared with knowledge of how much those specs can save them and forecast of chip need of the next 12-18 months, and the two work together to create value. For example, Google might offer to allow endorsements (as they did with Dell for their Google appliances) in exchange for favorable pricing and specifications.
The "do this or I'll switch" tactic only works well when there are many suppliers and products are relatively undifferentiated, like SDRAM or fan motors.
Odds are this is being driven by a data-center engineering team, who are looking at the cost savings of running their data center 5 degrees hotter.
You don't get what you don't ask for.
Intel will do exactly as much engineering as necessary to keep their target market up, and no more.
If the market wants chips that operate 5 degrees hotter.. the engineers will do their job and see if it can be done. Intel will charge a premium for this.
That's business.
Most of the power supply systems for my servers, which are HP G3-5 systems of various U sizes, tend to waste more power as temperature goes up.
This has nothing to do with CPU's though. It is the power supplies on the machines. As temperature goes up, efficiency goes down. At around 80 degrees I noticed a significant larger draw on the power supply with my amp meter.
I had a gaming system with two ATI 4870's and the 800 Watt power supply would crash my machine if I did not run the air conditioner and keep the room at 70 degrees after some fairly long Supreme Commander runs.
I noticed that the amperage would go up, and the power output would go down as temperature would go up.
I have not conducted any experiments in a lab setting with this stuff, but from experience, jacking the temperature up usually makes power supplies work harder and makes them less efficient.
-gc
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Yes, but way I see this is:
Intel isn't arbitrarily going, "man, we could make chips that run ok 5 degrees hotter, but we're gonna piss everyone off by demanding more cooling. Just because we can." Most likely Intel is already doing the best it can, and getting a bunch of chips which vary in how good they are. And they're getting the same bunch of chips regardless of whether Google demands higher temps or not.
Google just gets a cherry-picked bunch, but the average over Intel's production is still the same. Hence everyone else is getting a worse selection. They what remains after Google took the best.
It's a zero-sum game. The total load on the planet is the same. The same total bunch of chips exits Intel's fabs. On the total, no energy was conserved.
So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green". They can willy-wave about how energy efficient they are, by simply dumping the difference on someone else.
That's not "going green", that's a predatory approach. Your computers could require on the average an extra 0.5W in cooling, so Google can willy-wave that theirs uses 1W less. They just dumped their costs and their "eco burden" to someone else.
It's akin to me willy-waving that I'm so green and produce less garbage than you... by dumping some of my garbage in random other people's garbage bins across the town. Yay, I'm so green now, you all can start worshipping me. Well, no, on the total the same amount of garbage being produced, I just dumped it and the related costs on other people. That's not going green, that's being a predator.
I can see why a business might want to cut their own costs, and not care about yours. That's, after all, the whole "invisible hand" theory. But let me repeat it: on the whole no energy was conserved. They just passed off some of their cooling costs (energy _and_ money) to someone else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It also takes longer to boil ramen.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
And ideally, I'd come home to find Alyson Hannigan oiled up and duct taped to my bed
You know you're pathetic when they're even unwilling in your fantasies.
And ideally, I'd come home to find Alyson Hannigan oiled up and duct taped to my bed
You know you're pathetic when they're even unwilling in your fantasies.
You're assuming everyone prefers them willing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It's not just the celerons, its most CPUs. A modern CPU is quite big and contains a lot of components that aren't essential to the operation of the chip. If you disable these, you have a slightly less good chip without the engineering cost of designing a entirely new die layout. AMD takes this to extremes. Their Opterons have 4 cores, three hypertransport connections and a load of cache. If there is a manufacturing flaw in the cache, they are sold as a model with less cache. If it's in the cores, then they are sold as three, two, or single core chips. If it's in the HT controllers then they only support 2- or 4-way multichip configurations. Intel's 486SX line was just a 486 (later renamed the 486DX) where the FPU didn't work.
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