Google Calls For Power Supply Design Changes

Raindance writes "The New York Times reports that Google is calling 'for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of the new power supply would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiencies ... The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense — by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC's running eight hours a day, it will be possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California's energy rates.' This may have something to do with the electricity bill for Google's estimated 450,000 servers."

Re:Big ego department

[Anonymous Coward]

The spleen? You don't need it.

Re:What in a modern computer actually uses 12V?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And exactly what do you use such a server for? Not for internet, that's for damned sure, 115kbaud is far too slow to serve a 1.5TB line....

Re:Big ego department

[chroot_james]

Sco's lawyers might be out of a job soon. I'm sure they'd love to help!

Re:Why not -48?

[springbox]

48 volts is also the standard for Power over Ethernet (IEEE 802.3af) [wikipedia.org]. This may not be compatible, though, since telcos run -48, not +48

Sure they can! Just reverse the polarity and reroute all power to the main deflector dish!

Re:Why use individual power supplies?

[Sir Simon]

>>If you put a massive AC-DC transfomer in another area
Why do I suddenly see an image of a giant robot wearing a schoolboy uniform, playing an electric guitar?

Re:What in a modern computer actually uses 12V?

[ErikTheRed]

What happens if/when the system gets borked and you need to have access to a serial console to effect repairs?

Real servers have hardware remote console (such as this [hp.com]). You can remote control the box in just about any state other than "on fire".

Re:No...

[stunt_penguin]

Actually, you're spot on- why sell the physical machines (a fixed profit per machine sold) when you can sell a service (a steady income) .... that said a lot of companies would rather have 'their' people with their hands on their machines, but I'm sure a lot of organisations would benefit. They could even call the service Google Farm ;)

Come to think of it, given the recent story on slack govornmental data security, maybe they could have Google serve their data for them. They already know how hard it is to get data out of Google, right? :p

Re:What in a modern computer actually uses 12V?

[KermitJunior]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but VNC on a server? You use servers with windowing software on them? You must be new here. Slashdotters (*real* ones) only us CLI on their servers.

450,000 servers....

[Dr_Barnowl]

$450,000 dollars? What's that, you say that could pay to employ Fulcrum of Evil at Google for five years?

Ach, shoot, we spent it on USB ports. Never mind.