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Fujitsu To Show Off "Zero-Watt" PC At CeBIT
mobile writes "In August of last year Fujitsu announced new 'zero-watt' displays. This means the screens use absolutely no power when put into standby mode, unlike most other screens that use less than 1 watt, but still require some power. Now Fujitsu has announced they will be showing a zero-watt PC later this year at the CeBIT show. The PC is called the Esprimo Green and marks a first, in that it's able to use no power while in standby mode — but this is a feature that will be required from 2010 for new PCs released across Europe."
I assume "standby" means hibernate, not suspend due to the power required to refresh RAM. Or is Fujitsu introducing something with MRAM?
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
I've been looking for a computer powered by zero-point energy drawn from vacuum fluctuation.
Maybe I can transplant the power supply into my car and get infinite miles per gallon?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Not bad, but what about the actual power consumption of the device... how about making the PC consume less power while at low/medium load...
Or a huge bank of capacitors.
"See! Once it's warmed up, it takes zero watts even when it's *running*"
"yeah, but the lights all dim when I turn it on..."
Call me picky, but what I'd like to see is kilowatt-hours used. This could be a great energy-saver, but it could also be an inrush-current shell game.
How would you know whether the device is in standby or turned off? Normally an LED signifies this.
Perhaps a mechanical indicator? Or, e-ink?
That's AMAZING NEW TECH!!! Zero watts, ha? I can't believe we finally figured this shit out!
You can't handle the truth.
Press release corresponds with this.
a ZPM is to much power for a car put it in a space ship.
This means the screens use absolutely no power when put into standby mode, unlike most other screens that use less than 1 watt, but still require some power
I don't get this obsession with "standby" power draw... My computer and display and TV and DVD player already draw zero watts when off, thanks to the magic of the switch on the power strip.
And for the record, I don't even do this for the power savings - More than once, I've had my "expensive" electronic toys saved from nearby lightning strikes that took out things like alarm clocks and answering machines (No, a power strip won't stop a direct hit, but they do wonders to stop spikes up to a few hundred volts).
PC's from the early 80's used no power when you flipped the big red switch.
Not really "stand-by", since they couldn't auto-flip the switch, but still ...
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
I've already had some zero-watt computers:
- Commodore 64
- Hard-power Macs
- The AT/XT form factor, where the power switch ran directly to the power supply. For more impact, the kind with a giant red switch on the right side of the case near the rear, which a friend of mine called the "ENIAC switch". The IBM PS/2 series was like this too.
That must mean that it eats hot pockets for energy.
I'm pretty sure anything that uses a semiconductor to switch power to itself draws power constantly, unless they found some way to get around that.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Let's get real. It can't be ZERO watts and still be listening to the net, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Maybe less than one watt with custom CMOS net interfaces. But not ZERO.
To do that
1) They've managed to break the laws of physics or
2) They're lying or
3) They're storing power
And of course, if it's 3, that stored power has to be replenished when the computer is on, causing slightly higher draw then. It's certainly possible that the efficiency of doing that is greater than the efficiency of drawing a very small current from the line. But calling it "zero power" is just marketing. Truly "using zero power" would mean that any internal state of charge wouldn't be depleted either.
But I don't get the obsession with eliminating it. I mean reducing makes sense. There are situations where people can't or won't disconnect the power to a device. So let's make things efficient. A good example would be to use switching PSUs in wall warts instead of linear PSUs. They use less energy (in operation as well as standby), generate less heat and are smaller. Good, done. Likewise, a device shouldn't keep more on components than it needs in standby. If all you need is a small IR receiver to look for a signal, then there's very little circuitry that needs to be on. Don't have the devices CPU (most HDTVs have one) on, for example.
However, when you do that, you get to a point of using less than a watt. At that point, I don't see why we are quibbling. That small of a power draw is just insignificant. To give you some idea a 100hp car engine generates almost 75,000 watts at full power. Worrying over a device drawing milliwatts is silly.
Goes double since to reduce something to zero draw, you've no choice but to interrupt the power flow entirely. You can't have something like a remote control since you need power to watch for a signal.
The demands to lower standby power consumption are getting downright silly; it started as a good idea, ended up with some pretty decent results and looking forward to continual gradual improvements... but thats not enough for some bloody bureaucrat who has to justify his/her job and existence by demanding more to the point of absurdity.
Zero watts mandated in Europe? Why? Isn't it enough that you can shop around and get machines that draw just a few watts by going on standby instead of idling at 100+? That your screens also cut their usage by 95% or more when they go on standby? Diminishing returns, folks. Saving dollars (or Euros) on the power bill is one (big) thing but jumping through hoops to squeeze out a few more pennies... just to keep some bureaucrat happily self-relevant. That's just sad.
Anybody heard of "suspend to disk"? If you're running Linux on your laptop/notebook/mobile-pc then just do this : "sudo echo -n 'disk' > /sys/power/state " or, use your GUI of choice.
Other than the not-so-novel "bistable" ( "zero power" ala e-ink ) display, what's the big deal? And why the fuss about zero standby current when in S3 sleep ( standby ) mode it's measured in microamps?
jdb2
The problem with just fixing and selling the small stuff is that this can actually be counter-productive. "Green guilt" has a positive purpose: make people feel bad so they do less of that bad thing. The "eco products" counter that: buy our xxx and you don't have to feel bad. This would be OK except that people often then modify their behavior. Someone that feels bad for driving 5 miles with an SUV might feel they're doing the planet good when they drive 100 miles with a Prius.
Same deal here. I don't feel bad about leaving my computer on any more because the monitor is now using zero Watts.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is this some legalism, as in nutrition labeling, in which rounding is allowed? Can they round the power consumption to the nearest watt, and call anything drawing less than 0.5 watts "zero watts?"
I realize that geek.com does say "absolutely no power," but the farthest I can trace that statement is to pcworld, not to Siemens.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
1. Invent zero-watt sleep mode for PC.
2. Patent relevant technology.
3. Lobby the Euros for legislation requiring feature.
4. Profit!
(forget about valid strategy of turning off PC--stupid consumers can't be bothered)
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
The thing can draw no power if it uses the power that enters the box in an Ethernet frame to throw the switch that turns it on.. same for Bluetooth. All you have to do is rectify the incoming energy from the antenna and I'll bet it's enough to charge the gate capacitance of an "ON" pin on a power controller somewhere.
Simple, really... where there is any current at all, there is probably enough energy to turn on the switch.
Back in the 80s and 90s, all of my computers had "Zero-Watt" modes. After shutting down (in the latter days, parking the heads in the earlier days), I flipped a switch-like thingy that physically interrupted the flow of power to the computer. I had no idea this was so cutting edge that it would take so long to go mainstream.
BTW, you can cut the power to your computer if you use hibernate instead of standby. No need for new technology to do this. I can't help but wonder if re-labeling of hibernation mode will be the Big New Thing. "Look how amazing and Green(r)(c)(tm) we are by promoting this form of power savings that's been around for years. Aren't we awesome?"
Hibernate in an ATX system will NOT bring power draw to 0 watts, just low power state. The motherboard header is still powered to allow things like WoL, keyboard power up, peripheral and clock based power on, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not if you need it to achieve 1.21 gigawatts!
It looks to me (from http://sp.fujitsu-siemens.com/dmsp/docs/ds_esprimo_e.pdf)
Hmm... so it requires no power to standby, eh?
What is for some reason, the Windows OS (yeah... imagine that) people run on there ended up crashing into such standby state, and even the power switch won't reboot the machine as some more severe crashes lead to...
In this case, would pulling the power cable, which is pretty much the usual last resort, do anything?
it looks from here http://sp.fujitsu-siemens.com/dmsp/docs/ds_esprimo_e.pdf like its only the screen that draws 0 watts when ts in standby - looks like the power for the screen is routed through the pc box and so they just make the pc turn off the power to the screen when the pc is in standby. It is a bit hard to tell, as the first part of it seems to be written in engrish
Maybe it's hand cranked.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
How the hell did you get an off-topic mod when your question absolutely is on topic?
Okay, they'll make a modified one that doesn't keep those features active and opens a relay at the end of the hibernation process which is then closed by pressing a button on the case, triggering restoration from hibernation mode. And You can make hibernate zero-watt by unplugging the device. And you can still do all this by just turning the darn thing off and cutting the power. This isn't a situation that needs technological innovation. It needs people to be educated, then exercise some common sense. Then they can save money without having to spend it on new equipment.
If they want to save some freakin' power in the future, stop loading up operating systems with all this eye candy BS that require multicore processors and 128 megs of dedicated video ram just to work. Put out a "gets the job done" operating system that is rock solid and has a small resource footprint. Then start pushing the new low-power processors like Intel's Atom. Flood corporate America with those things and stop giving core 2 duos to secretaries who spend all day reading email, typing up documents, making powerpoint presentations, and all that other stuff that doesn't need a 100 watt CPU and aero effects.
THAT is where we need to cut power consumption. Saving 100 watts over 8-9 hours, not 1-4 watts over 15-16 hours.
If, for example, mandates like this end up requiring use of suspend-to-disk over suspend-to-RAM, increasing the unsuspend time, the likely effect is that more people will simply leave their computers fully powered on for more time, making the overall power usage worse than before.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd tend to agree with your perspective. My laptop cooling fans make a table or desk irrelevant. It simply hovers about 8" over anything while running. Hmmm. Maybe that takes a little power too.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
This is true, kindof. You can take a system that was hibernated and unplug it from the wall, when it receives power again it will resume where it left off.
it's able to use no power while in standby mode -- but this is a feature that will be required from 2010 for new PCs released across Europe.
This is not true. The EU will allow 1 W from 2010 in standby mode and off mode and 0.5 W from 2014. There is an exception for devices that have an "information or status display" which allows for a power consumption of 2 W (2014: 1 W) in standby mode.
See commission regulation 1275/2008 Annex II.
Any insulator, no matter how high the resistance, will leak *some* energy. The question is how much - zero is impossible, so how much above zero is it?
When I saw this headline I thought they had done something really cool. Imagine for one moment, a netbook whose display, when set with an image, can be powered down, but retain the image. Imagine also, that when sitting there, doing not a lot, the 'keep alive' operations can be handed over to a very low power co-processor, and the majority of the system powered down... Imagine how cool THAT would be!
While I'm all for staying generally logged-in as a normal unprivileged user (okay, schmuck), when there's admin work to be done it's time to just su to root or switch to a different terminal and log in as "He who shalt be obeyed".
One "su root -" (plus password) is shorter than a lot of "sudo" commands.
Standby requires very little power. Couldn't they just put a battery in the computer that keeps giving power to the computer in standby? By the time the battery wears out, most users will have gotten a new computer, anyway.
Well, besides the blindingly obvious, The switch at the front of the PC needs a live circuit to work. Theres needs to be a potential difference there so that when you close the circuit, theres electricity to flow through. Now while this may not actually use any power, it still means the need for other systems in the PC (bassically semi-conductors which use power to turn off) to be in use. So no, not possible.
put it in a space ship
Those are such a bitch to park at the supermarket... plus MIB will show up wanting to see papers and whatnot.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
You have to power the digital logic to decode the network messages and find out if they are really events meant to wake the machine. Otherwise knows as the network stack. You cannot just wake up because you've got enough carrier energy to power the wake-up circuit. The carrier is there frequently if not constantly.
First link does not work. It should be: zero-watt displays
My computer uses 3w in standby. That corresponds to 2kWh/month. Which costs about 40cents. It's not worth that much effort to save 40cents/month.
Overall, I average 400w at home (~300kWh/month). Using a zero-watt standby computer would reduce my power consumption by less than 1%. That is not very significant.
I can see how this might help for business that have lots of computer, but in most cases, those companies don't even put their computers in standby when not in use currently, so a zero-watt standby mode won't help them either.
There are much better ways of saving power, like encouraging companies to put desktops in standby when not is use for any length of time. That would save much more than 3w per computer.
So what keeps the clock running?
Try to look at his statement in the correct context and you won't have a problem with it. Now maybe if you were trying to be sarcastic, that would be fine.
I believe he is talking about AT systems. No hibernate, no low power mode. The switch on the power supply cut off the 110VAC (or 220VAC) coming into the computer.
ATX didn't come along until 1995.
I was referencing this line:
BTW, you can cut the power to your computer if you use hibernate instead of standby.
Which definitely wasn't talking about AT systems =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
My point is not what can you do with a watt, my point is that a watt is a trivial amount of power compared to what our devices use. The monitor I'm looking at right now while typing this is drawing about 60 watts, and it's an LCD. My air conditioner draws around 3500 watts when active. My car can produce nearly 130,000 watts when run to it's full capacity.
So suppose you have a device that draws 1 watt idle. Most draw less, but suppose. Ok that means you can run that for 60 hours before equaling just one hour of my monitor usage. You can run it for half a year before equaling just one hour of my AC. The car, well I can't do an accurate comparison since it doesn't run at full power, but I'm betting you can run an idle device for over a year for the same amount of energy as a short trip.
So, my point is that worrying about that shit is stupid. That isn't where the majority of our energy usage is happening. Saying "Oh we reduced this to zero," sounds nice until you realize that in a single day an AC will use more than that thing will over a lifetime of idle.
I mean take my monitor as an example. As I said, I measure the power draw of it on to be about 60 watts. When it's idle, as in I've pressed the "soft off" switch, it doesn't read a power draw. My meter has a resolution of 1 watt so I don't know what the draw is. Somewhere less than a watt. We'll call it half a watt for argument's sake. I suspect it's actually less, but whatever.
Now I've owned the monitor for about a year, and in that time it's been on for 2090 hours (it's a professional monitor, keeps that in it's firmware). So during it's life it has used about 125kWh. Assuming that it is in soft off mode the rest of the time (I actually shut down my UPS) it would have spent about 6,670 hours idle. That would equal a usage of about 3kWh, maybe less.
So, what's the real thing to solve here in terms of less energy usage? Worrying about making it "zero power" when off (which I can do if I like, either with the monitor's hard off switch of the UPS) or reducing the power used when on by just 5%? Well 5% of 125kWh is 6kWh so over twice the draw as reducing the idle mode. It's also a lot more realistic. An LED backlight would probably get that 5%, maybe more.
That's what I mean. It is worrying about shit that just doesn't matter much. Even if you are just worried about the electronics, the power draw is in their on mode. An hour of on will equal days of idle. However all that pales in comparison to many other devices.
So sure, I see the point in saying "Keep your soft off draw as low as practical." Seems like modern devices do that already. However this "It must be zero watts," is stupid. I reiterate: 1 watt is NOT a lot of energy.
My computer, and monitor for that matter, have two power controls. One is a button. It's the "soft off" button. It orders the device to it's idle state. The power draw is then extremely minimal, under one watt. The button can then turn it back on. They also have a switch, this is the "hard off" switch. It interrupts the electricity from the mains lines. There is no power draw because there cannot be, it has been interrupted.
So if you are that worried about it, just flip the hard off switch. If your PSU lacks one, get a better PSU. All the high grade PSUs I've owned feature a hard off switch. However, you'll probably save WAAAAY more power simply by getting a better PSU and it's accompanying high efficiency than any messing with the switch.
There is also the old Sycraft patented mechanical creation of an ultra high impedance barrier by way of separation of prongs from receptacle. Or, more simply, pull the fucking power cord out of the wall.
This is what makes zero current standby possible.
You take a very large capacity 5V capacitor and use it to power the 'on standby' electronics. The only job of these electronics is to monitor the wakeup sources, for a TV it's the IR receiver, for a PC it would be the 'standby button', the 'Wake on LAN' and probably a timer. The rest of the TV is turned off, the rest of the PC is put into hibernation, it works and then there's no reason to power an unknown number of gigabytes of high performance RAM.
Why do you do this ...
If a switch mode supply is providing any current it has to draw a lot of power from the mains, for very low currents (like when in standby) over 99% of the power drawn by the PSU is wasted as heat in the PSU. OTOH if you take no power from the PSU you can turn it off (in fact modern ones sometimes turn themselves off). Even if you have to 'wakeup' the PSU every day or two to recharge the capacitor there is a considerable saving. But for simple electronics (an IR receiver, a CMOS clock, a 10-Base-T receiver) the capacitor can probably keep things going for weeks or months on it's own.
BTW: If you PC doesn't need to wake on lan or similar you can USE HIBERNATION NOW!
Seriously, this joke has more than run its co
This has been done along time ago. It was even covered on /.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/21/1947222
Mang computer could sleep by store the state before in the hark disk, use this ways, we also can "run" our pc in zero watt, haha
Seriously, stick a laptop battery in your PC, use that to keep it running in suspend mode, and you've got a PC that uses no power at all in suspend. Of course, it uses a bit more when it's running, because those batteries have to be charged...
Turn strip 'off'. Zero watts drawn by monitor. Manage with fingers, not bluetooth.
You mean "off"?
I want one for my laptop!
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Currently the EU has ca. 500 million people, while Europe as a whole has closer to 700 million citizens.
Your two posts contradict each other.
Just beam up what you need no need to park.
This is ridiculous. Less the product but we as users. It takes what...0.5 seconds to hit the power button on a display? Combined with powering it down to ~1 Watt automatically in case the coffee break goes longer than expected the solution has already been here for the last 20 years.
I knew the GUI was just a fad!