Where’s the Intel Atom? Maybe Servers?

ComputerWorld continues the discussion of Intel Atom in Servers.

Intel pushes Atom processor every which way but one

Will Atoms cannibalize server processors, too?

By Eric Lai

March 3, 2009 (Computerworld) Intel Corp. desperately wants the hit Atom netbook processor inside smartphones, cars -- and even factory robots.

After initial reluctance, it's also pushing Atoms for use in lower-end desktop and notebook PCs.

There's only one market for which the Atom is entirely verboten: servers. Intel wants to protect this plum market, where it sells its latest and fastest processors and reaps its highest profits. Its Xeon family of server CPUs range in price from $200 to $3,000 for those destined for four-way to eight-way servers, according to Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight64. Intel sells its Atom CPU for as little as $29.

Marketed like sports cars, blazing-fast server CPUs are also power hogs, unable to tamp down their consumption even at idle.

"If you want Ferrari-like performance, you're going to get Ferrari-like mileage," said Ian Lao, an analyst at In-Stat Inc.

But as energy prices rise, an increasing number of users and vendors are experimenting with the Mini Cooper approach -- the idea that smaller can get you there just fine and for less money.

I had fun talking to Eric Lai about this.

"People may laugh at the idea of an Intel Atom server, but it all depends on what you want to do," said consultant andGreen Data Center Blog author Dave Ohara. .

also, found this forum http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/32026-12-flops-watts-comparison-intel-atom-xeon-core2duoquestion on Tom’s Hardware.

Hi,
As my semester project, I have to measure Flops/Watts for Intel Atom, Xeon and core2duo using some benchmark(e.g. SPEC2005). Based on those results I have to compare these systems.
The second part is optimise these systems to increase Flops/Watts.
Can anyone help me to get started.
Thanks,
Tariq

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On-line Shopping 1/3 Less Energy than Brick and Mortar

WSJ has a blog post on The Green Side of Shopping.

The Green Side of Online Shopping

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

E-commerce reduces the environmental impact of shopping by using about a third less energy than traditional retail — but only if you skip the express airmail.

A study out Tuesday by the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute offers a scientifically rigorous estimate of e-commerce’s green benefits. E-commerce not only uses less energy, but its carbon footprint is also a third smaller than bricks-and-mortar retail, the scientists found.

Lead researcher H. Scott Matthews and his team compared the energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions required to deliver a small flash drive to a shopper via a trip to a traditional store versus buying and shipping the flash drive via Buy.com.

The methodology used:

Coming up with these calculations required many assumptions by the scientists – but they’re a lot more informed than past attempts to account for the environmental benefits of e-commerce, say the researchers. That’s because the e-commerce site Buy.com made available to them information about its data center, last mile delivery practices and other sources of energy consumption. (Buy.com is a member of the Green Design Institute’s Corporate Consortium, but didn’t pay for or direct the study.)

The scientists found that by far the largest environmental cost of traditional shopping is a consumer driving his or her own car to a store. (They assumed that the average person drives about 14 miles round-trip per shopping outing, and buys about three different items on one trip.)

Much of the energy expenditure for e-commerce also goes towards last-mile delivery. But a UPS truck delivering dozens of packages along its daily route uses a less energy per package, on average. That’s where e-commerce really shines.

What about the data center?

Data centers and computers, it turns out, are a relatively small energy cost for e-commerce.

The results based on data from Buy.com can’t necessarily be extrapolated to other e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, warn the scientists. That’s because Buy.com operates with an unusual virtual model in which products are shipped directly from distribution partners to customers, eliminating a step in the supply chain that many other e-commerce companies still use.

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Cebit’s Green IT 2009

GreenerComputing posts on Cebit’s Green IT efforts.

Green IT Takes Center Stage at CeBIT

By GreenerComputing Staff
Published March 3, 2009

HANOVER, DE -- Last year's CeBIT conference in Hanover had a noticeably green hue: Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer pushed energy efficiency in a keynote speech, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative launched a European-focused green IT program, Greenpeace released an environmentally oriented ranking of OEMs at the show, to name just a few events.

This year's gathering will likely leave all those announcements in the dust.

When the nearly 500,000 expected attendees arrive at the show this week, they'll find a greatly expanded area for CeBIT's Green IT World showcase arena.

The Green IT World will showcase five areas key to improving IT's environmental performance: data center and chip technologies, IT innovations, communications and mobile applications, and green IT strategies and consulting. A fifth area, centered on telepresence and videoconferencing, highlights IT's potential for reducing environmental costs of other areas of business operations.

About 20 organizations will be presenting and exhibiting in the green IT section of CeBit, including Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, IBM, Nokia Siemens, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and others.

Here is Cebit’s specific on Green IT.

Datacenter & Chip Technologies
The consistently growing demand by professional and private users for IT processing power results in a correlating increase in energy use. Only in the last few years have center operators realized the large potential for optimization - both through modern server architecture and cooling technologies, and also through virtualization and consolidation. In the focus area data center & chip technologies exhibitors have the ideal forum in which to present their solutions for planning, modernization and implementation of energy efficient data centers. Within this context, future appliances, potentials and visions of innovative chip technologies shall also be demonstrated.

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Dual-Core Atom 263% Faster than Pentium 4 2.8 Running MySQL Select Queries

Let’s start with the conclusion.

Final conclusion: The Atom is handling better multiple tasks, it manages to distribute its tasks to all of its cores. It can handle multiple requests simultaneously and this makes it more functional. While the P4 is faster per clock speed, it can work only on one task at a time, where the processor dedicates all of its resources. When a new task arrives it simply discards it or delays it, while the ATOM can process multiple requests at once the P4 cannot. When the load was higher the ATOM outperformed the Pentium 4 almost 100% of the time. The MySQL performance difference was also very clear in that the ATOM outperformed the Pentium 4 several times over.

This quote comes from this word doc from this page. http://www.singlehop.com/servers/atom_tests.php

Test Name
P4 2.8 Ghz
Dual-Core ATOM 330
Results

MySQL 1,000 Select Queries from 10 Clients
5,948
15,661
1ATOM is 263% Faster

MySQL 1,000 Select Queries from 100 Clients
5,721
15,203
ATOM is 265% Faster

MySQL 1,000 Update Queries from 10 Clients
1974
2603
ATOM is 31% Faster

MySQL 1,000 Update Queries from 100 Clients
2016
2389
ATOM is 19% Faster

MySQL Stress Test
2000
2332
ATOM is 17% Faster

Disk Read/Write - Write 5 GB File to Disk
2:41 Minutes
2:13 Minutes
ATOM is 13% Faster

who is SingleHop?  A hosting company that offers the Intel Atom server as their cheapest hosting solution.

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Google’s Focus on Green (Money)

news.com (original source NYtimes) has a post on Google’s Marissa Mayer.

Yet, despite whatever frivolity might attach itself to her, Mayer, 33, plays a pivotal, serious role at Google. Almost every new feature or design, from the wording on a Google page to the color of a Google toolbar, must pass muster with her or legions of Google users will never see it. She is one of the few Googlers with unfettered access to and influence over Brin and Page, and Valley wags wonder whether Google's familiar white home page will even look the same if she leaves the company.

One part caught my eye is Google’s focus on color (the example is shades of green) to drive more clicks = more money.

As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google's revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Divine's team resisted the greener hue, so Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.

This same focus on green and its monetary impact can be applied to Google’s renewable energy and data centers efforts.

I missed Google’s Green web page http://www.google.com/corporate/green/

And, their new url for green data center. ;-) http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/

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