Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Saving Power With Linux

September 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Saving Power With Linux

TAGS: Linux

Via Stephen Shankland at CNet - Very cool news about an effort to run Linux more efficiently on servers, laptops & mobile devices. The effort was kicked off by Intel, but is open to all.

According to Stephen's report:

"On a current laptop, running Fedora 7 from Red Hat uses about 21 watts. "If you apply six little changes we propose, that same laptop takes 15.5 watts," Hohndel said. "You have just added a more than an hour to your battery run time.""

"Taking Intel's advice and fixes can trim about 10 watts of power consumption off a modern dual-processor server, said Dirk Hohndel, chief technologist of Intel open-source technology center. That's not a gargantuan amount--until you consider that if done correctly it's free power savings, that each watt of server energy saved cuts another 1.3 watts from air conditioning (according to Intel figures), and of course that 10 watts per server is a lot when multiplied by the thousands of servers that populate larger data centers."

There is a lot of pressure to consolidate commodity hardware onto, bigger more efficient systems. The competition between commodity systems & larger systems may well result in Linux becoming "the most energy efficient" operating system on servers. It appears that Intel is focusing on this goal from a commodity server standpoint. How long until the larger systems vendors decide to do the same with Linux? (Note: they may be doing so already - so please comment and update us all!)

PS: I should state: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."

Posted by Savio Rodrigues on September 20, 2007 10:09 AM

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