Intel’s recent announcement of a 80 core processor on a single chip combined with this story on the huge amount of energy used by data centres has (I predict) data centre managers on the edges of their seats - hoping that the Intel innovation is released to market soon. If you combine that with the energy savings soon to be realized with these advanced hard drive technologies, and this development in processor memory (cache), the energy consumption of data centres will be cut in half soon - a bonus to the bill payers, and a lessened strain on our environment. ‘The future’s so bright, I’ve gotta wear shades!’

Here’s part of the Intel announcement:

The Teraflops Research Chip is the latest development from the Intel Tera-scale Computing Research Program. This chip is Intel’s first silicon tera-scale research prototype. It is the first programmable chip to deliver more than one trillion floating point operations per second (1 Teraflops) of performance while consuming very little power. This research project focuses on exploring new, energy–efficient designs for future multi–core chips, as well as approaches to interconnect and core–to–core communications. The research chip implements 80 simple cores, each containing two programmable floating point engines—the most ever to be integrated on a single chip. Floating point engines are used for accurate calculations, such as for graphics as well as financial and scientific modeling.

Here’s part of the story on data centre energy comsumption:

A report issued today estimates that the overall electricity used by servers–computers that make up the networks of organizations, from small businesses to giant financial institutions–doubled between 2000 and 2005. The reasons for this growth rate were an increase in the number of servers installed in data centers and the demands of auxiliary equipment such as cooling fans and facility lighting, says Jonathan Koomey, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and author of the report. “I was surprised by the doubling,” says Koomey. “I expected some growth, but not quite as large.”

In 2005, servers and their auxiliary equipment accounted for an estimated 1.2 percent of all power consumption in the United States and 0.8 percent worldwide, the report states. Koomey says that server power consumption in the United States was the equivalent of that of the entire state of Mississippi in 2005; that year, 20 other states used less power. The report, titled “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the World,” was funded by AMD and peer-reviewed by the major companies that sell servers, including Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and Dell.