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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.
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.
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).
A shell game?? In this industry???
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking 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.
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.
I know its pretty new technology, but how about a mains power switch?
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.
I guess a self-sustaining relay might keep a computer on after it's started and draw nothing when it's off, but the computer then can not turn itself on.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
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
A system controllable relay in the power supply would do the trick.
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.
I love those switches, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about them.
My 80+ PSU has one of those on the back, I use it whenever I'm messing around in the case since it's easier than constantly plugging and unplugging the power cord.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
But then how would it turn itself on when coming out of standby?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
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.
Just don't forget to feed it, or in Soviet Russia... oh wait, nevermind.
They are also good to use since in some designs they leave the chassis ground connected. So you can cut power, but keep the case grounded (that's what it's grounded through) and then ground yourself to that by touching it. No static zap.
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.
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?
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.
The monitors they had previously just charged a capacitor whilst running to power the switch back on thing. how they're gonna keep the memory charged is a question you'll prolly have to read the article for.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
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?
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.
Umm, my current dual core machine is much more energy efficient than my previous machine was. It doesn't heat my room the way that the old one did. During the summer the old one was basically unusable due to the amount of heat it was putting off. My new machine is throttled down quite a bit more and only puts off more energy when I'm recompiling the OS or something like that.
A properly designed computer is going to be more efficient now than it was previously.
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
If the *user* wants to turn it on, the user can trigger that relay in the power supply with the "on" switch.
If the device wants to turn *itself* on to kill all humans and take over the world, that plan is foiled as an added bonus. ;-P
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.
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...
As long as you're running a modern desktop motherboard/processor combo (or one of the older MoDT systems), you can perform dynamic frequency scaling.
Mine currently doesn't, but my next will.
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
You mean "off"?
I guess a self-sustaining relay might keep a computer on after it's started and draw nothing when it's off, but the computer then can not turn itself on.
*Whooooooooooosh!*
We're talking about MONITORS! Why would a power switch need a self-sustaining relay? You turn it on yourself, you turn it off yourself. A mains power switch uses 0 watts when off... I'd hope!
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.
You need to be careful where you direct your wooshes. Tell me, what's the difference between 'standby' and 'turned off'?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
You need to be careful where you direct your wooshes.
I'll woosh wherever I like, thank you.
Tell me, what's the difference between 'standby' and 'turned off'?
You tell me, that's the first time you've mentioned standby in this thread.
I was making a joke, suggested using a mains power switch to use 0 watts when switched off, hence the 'wooshing' sound you heard of a joke passing overhead. Pretty sure you're the one discussing semiconductors to enable low-power standby.
If you do want to learn more about standby, (I'm not going to spoon-feed you the different betwixt), then I'd suggest reading the wikipedia article.
My point to it not being able to turn itself back on is that it would be useless for standby then, and the claim they have is that it uses 0 watts in 'standby', not when turned off.
I'll not spoon feed you the context of the commentary to an article, though my English instructor would suggest otherwise.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
*sigh*
It was a *joke*!
Anyway, is it really that hard to push a power button when you want to use your monitor?
Certainly not, I'm just dubious that they found some way to actually get something to turn itself on without power, like they ignored the conventional definition of 'standby' like hard drive manufacturers once did when marketing to consumers.
Anyways, I knew you were joking, I was just pissed off earlier because my English instructor is very uncompromising and I need a little accommodation sometimes with how easily I get confused by how fast she speaks.
There is this server based software the college uses to manage grades and letting students know what assignments are due. I've known about this for a long time but I wasn't aware she had actually taken advantage of it, and not clearly informed us... well, maybe she did, I've been having a hard time paying attention to anything lately, too many big changes to keep up.
This wouldn't normally pissed if I wasn't getting into Nursing, and it's a competitive program and your grades effect if you get in significantly. You have to have at least a 2.5 but I want to have at least a 3.8, and this is not helping me.
Maybe I should actually start using my Slashdot journal to start venting, I've got a lot frustrating me lately.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"