More power; more heat; more problems

Power leakage means new chips waste more energy, analyst says

New computer servers are more powerful than their predecessors, but waste more energy, making it difficult to operate systems efficiently and without overheating chips that are becoming increasingly susceptible to hot temperatures, a Forrester Research analyst said Thursday.

Leakage — the amount of power flowing when a transistor is turned off — accounts for between 18 percent and 29 percent of total power usage in Intel Xeon processors, Forrester Vice President Jean-Pierre Garbani said in a Webinar for IT professionals hosted by enterprise management vendor BMC Software.

Faster switching produces more power consumption and more heat, yet the increasingly fine features of new chips must be protected by lowering the maximum operating temperatures, raising a conundrum for IT departments.

“If you have an increase in computing demand for business requirements, you’re going to (quickly) come to a point where there won’t be enough space in your data center. You can also run out of cooling capacity,” Garbani says.

Computerworld