Signs of the Times – ‘Green-IT’ and ‘Skulltrail’

February 24, 2008

Two days ago this year’s CeBIT opened in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT is the world’s biggest information technology trade show with about some 6000 exhibitiors and half a million visitors.

This year’s fair special, a Future Forum, is all about Green-IT:

In order to give the "hot" issue of climate protection the major attention it deserves throughout the global ICT industry, the makers of CeBIT are launching a new "Green IT Village" in Hall 9, a "Green IT Guide" plus an array of forums and lectures dedicated to the topic.

Also at CeBIT Intel attracted huge crowds of desktop PC users with a brandnew motherboard:

The Intel Desktop Board D5400XS, when paired with two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors, forms the foundation of the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Hardcore gamers will welcome the opportunity to enjoy multiple simultaneous graphics card solutions featuring either NVIDIA SLI or ATI Crossfire for today’s latest graphics-intensive titles.

According to my dead tree computer geek magazine, a full D5400XS system with four graphic cards will have an electric consumption of some 1.4 kilowatt.

Intel’s remarkable and somewhat fitting marketing name for the new product is ‘Skulltrail‘.

Posted by b on February 24, 2008 at 18:31 UTC | Permalink

Comments

we should look to the heating or perhaps cooking industry to come up with a furnace or stove that uses a cpu to produce heat. might as well use that energy for something more usefull than simply playing world of warcraft. you could warm your home and slay demons at the same time or perhaps prepare a nice helping of macaroni and cheese while posting to MoA.

Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 24 2008 19:05 utc | 1

“I saw the best of my generation playing pinball” I guess should be updated.
http://no-words.com/2005/08/dan-bern-wasteland.html

Posted by: dacorilitter | Feb 24 2008 21:32 utc | 2

Skulltrail is an outlier meant for the tiny tiny wedge of the market that pays a premium for getting to have the best system possible, or even just as a marketing tool for Intel to claim that they do indeed offer the best machine. The real trend over the past few years have been more power efficient processors compared to Intel’s previous desktop series, and as the market as a whole adopts the more power benign notebook form factor, a general trend toward efficiency.
That’s not to say that the computer industry as a whole is as green as an apple, every industry has tradeoffs involved with it and should strive to reduce their environmental impact, but this analysis overweighs the minor development of the uber-extreme system components that have always existed, and have never been adopted by anywhere near the majority of the computer market.

Posted by: anon4672 | Feb 26 2008 3:54 utc | 3

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