Intel has managed to make its power-hungry hot-running microprocessors a thing of the past, but now it has bigger problems to tackle, according to Justin Rattner, chief technology officer.
At a briefing on Intel’s “Eco-Technology” research on Friday, Mr Rattner showed slides on how the CPU (central processing unit) was now just a small piece of the power-consumption pie in a PC . Computing itself represented only 2 per cent of the world’s energy-efficiency problems.
Paul Otellini, chief executive, had committed the world’s biggest chipmaker in 2005 to making its chips offer 10 times the performance while reducing power requirements by a factor of 10 within five years.
That target had already been achieved by this year with its Atom microprocessor, the CTO said.
“In fact, we will significantly exceed that 10x reduction in power next year with the second generation designs – the Moorestown platform,” Mr Rattner added.
Intel was now dedicating research to making other parts of computers more energy-efficient, as well as data centres that housed them and devices in the wider world.
The buzz phrase Intel has generated for PCs and the data centres is “Load Adaptive Power”. This means adjusting the amount of electricity provided so it is just delivered in precise amounts to particular points when needed.
In the data centre, this means using sensors to help model “weather maps” for the heat fluctuations around servers, so they do not have to be blanketed constantly in chilled air conditioning.
Inside the PC, Intel researchers are putting a lot of work into the power supplies and increasing the efficiency of converting alternating current to direct current.
Eventually, it plans to include regulators on its chips that will control instantly and precisely the amounts of power needed for the various devices feeding into and out of the microprocessor.
Intel is also looking at harvesting free energy to power devices such as mobile phones. As well as photovoltaic cells that can be embedded in the display to supply solar power, there are less obvious sources.
Body heat can be used, radiation from cell towers and wi-fi, and even actions such as thumbing through emails on a Blackberry trackball can be utilised as a mechanical method to boost battery power.
