power consumption
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Light up Greenwave Reality's smart bulbs with your iPhone
Here's how it goes: I say, "It feels like we're living in the future," and you all yell, "So where are the jetpacks?" There are plenty of missing pieces from the Jetsons-style view of the future, but at least the smart home -- controllable, reactive, energy-efficient and easy to use -- is on its way. One of the companies trying to push that vision forward is lighting vendor Greenwave Reality [their site is a little overwhelmed right now]. Founded by veterans of Cisco's consumer networking business, Greenwave has spent the past few years developing products intended for distribution by European utilities, and it's now rolling out its Connected Lighting Solution for homeowners in the EU with certification for the US market as well. With the Greenwave kit -- not sold directly, but through distribution and utility partners -- and your iPhone or iPad, it will be simple to set up a custom lighting environment with up to 500 devices. Rather than controlling lighting at the switch or outlet level, the CLS actually takes the network smarts all the way down to the bulb. The LED diffuse bulbs fit standard sockets and (like CFL and other efficient bulbs) deliver the equivalent light of incandescents with a fraction of the power consumption. Unlike conventional bulbs, however, each of these sports a chipset from Dutch semiconductor giant NXP, known for making near-field communications (NFC) modules for cellphones and tablets. The NXP module wirelessly connects to other bulbs and to a remote control via a JenNet-IP mesh, an ultra-low-power IPv6 wireless network. Disconnecting a bulb makes no difference to the overall health of the mesh; the remaining bulbs autoconfigure and keep talking. The wireless chipset sips a tiny amount of power, so it doesn't impair the energy efficiency of the bulbs (the product is now Energy Star certified for the US market). The heart of the JenNet mesh is the Greenwave wireless controller, which connects to your home network to bridge your WiFi to the lighting WLAN and provide anywhere, anytime access to your lights. As soon as a bulb is powered on for the first time, it begins to dim up and down to indicate that it's ready for setup. You can use the iOS app to control the light individually, or bind it with other bulbs in a fixture. Turn on a whole room or just one lamp; it's simple with either the app or the hard remote. The app works in your house or anywhere in the world, letting you turn on and off lights when you're on the road. Of course, you can still use your conventional light switches in a pinch; flick off and back on two times to override the soft controls. With custom dimming timers and sunrise/sunset awareness, the automation possibilities of the CLS are impressive -- create a preset for early mornings, late romantic lights or whatever look you like. You can even take pictures of your lighting fixtures to customize the iOS app controls if you want. When combined with the company's Smart Home Platform, the automation opportunities extend beyond lighting to climate controls, security, appliances and more. Greenwave's technology has received enthusiastic support from the IPSO Alliance, the trade group working to deliver "the Internet of Things" for networked device awareness. Sounds great, so when and where can you buy it? The company's iOS app is in the App Store now, but as for the hardware, you're somewhat at the mercy of distribution partners at utilities that buy into Greenwave's approach. CEO Greg Memo describes Greenwave as "the brand behind the brand" for connected home lighting, so you're most likely to see "powered by Greenwave Reality" somewhere on the package rather than on its own. Exact prices will vary by region and provider, but with Energy Star rebates and other incentives the company expects bulbs to be available for around US$20 or less; a four-bulb kit with remote and wireless controller (one-time purchases) will come in at or under US$200. That may sound steep, but the company estimates that replacing 10 bulbs with LED Greenwave bulbs (a net cost of $320 counting the controller) will save about $150 in energy costs in the first year of operation vs. incandescent bulbs... and the LED bulbs have a projected lifespan of 10 years or more. Check out the Greenwave Reality video below for more on the Connected Lighting Solution.
Sassor wants to let users know just how much electricity their gadgets are wasting (hands-on)
Everyone knows that their game consoles, appliances and HDTVs are energy vampires, and while Energy Star-certified products tell us which gadgets are more green-friendly than others, we still don't know just how much juice they're actually sucking down in a given day. Enter Sassor, a start-up from Japan that's created a system to monitor the electrical consumption of anything plugged into a wall outlet -- from PCs to refrigerators. It tracks power consumption using current sensors clamped onto power cords, which communicate wirelessly via ZigBee with a module (based on an Arduino design) that uploads the info to the cloud. Through the web portal, users can track energy consumption on a per-device basis in real-time, letting them figure out which gadgets are most responsible for their sky-high utility bill -- and take appropriate steps to correct the problem. Currently, it's aimed solely at businesses, but once Sassor's on its feet, funding-wise, the plan is to also put them in people's homes. The company told us it'll ditch ZigBee in favor of a WiFi solution in such future iterations, and it'll make an SDK and the system APIs available to all so that people can program for the platform and improve it in ways currently not contemplated. Alas, there's neither a timetable nor a price for the consumer version just yet, but you can see some pictures of the hardware's innards below.
AMD Piledriver cores will clock over 4GHz, employ 'resonant clock mesh'
AMD's Trinity APU can do some remarkable things, but we still don't know exactly what magic ingredients make its Piledriver cores superior to the tepidly received Bulldozer. Now though, a firm called Cyclos claims it's supplying 'resonant clock mesh' power-saving technology for use in the new module. In speaking to the media, it's revealed that this will help to enable a "4+ GHz" factory clock speed, which sounds high if it definitely refers to an integrated chip with low-power credentials. As for the resonant clock mesh itself, it's a bit like KERS for processors: it recycles clock power instead of letting it dissipate and thereby enables higher clock speeds in "next generation SoCs that also require ultra-low power consumption." We also know that the technology is financially backed by ARM and Siemens and has seen precious little implementation prior to AMD -- which is fine, so long as all that resonance doesn't make our rig hum even louder.
TI promises 33 percent drop in power consumption with new Bluetooth system-on-chip
Bluetooth may enable a whole host of different wireless possibilities, but that often comes at the expense of one important factor: battery life. Texas Instruments is hoping to make that slightly less of an issue with its new CC2541 Bluetooth system-on-a-chip, however, which promises a 33 percent reduction in power consumption compared to its previous CC2540 SoC. That's done without changing the configuration of the chip itself, which means manufacturers will be able to switch to the new design without making any major changes to their own devices -- it's intended for use in everything from sports and fitness gadgets to home automation equipment. The full rundown of specs can be found in the press release after the break.
New quantum tunneling transistors to make PCs less power-hungry
Yes, that awesome new 8-core chip in your PC is the fastest thing on the block, but it's got your utility meter spinning accordingly. Fortunately, researchers from Penn State have come up with a new high performance transistor that may turn future chips from power hogs into current-sipping silicon. The group, in cooperation with semiconductor manufacturer IQE, has created a high-performance transistor capable of significantly reducing power demand whether it's idle or switching. Doctoral candidate Dheeraj Mohata's the one who made it happen by inventing an alternative to traditional MOSFET (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors) technology capable of turning on and off using far less power. Mohata's method uses a tunneling field effect transistor crafted from dissimilar semiconductor materials to provide instant on-off capability at 300 millivolts -- compared to MOSFET's one volt requirement -- to provide a power savings of 70 percent. You can dig deeper into the technical transistor details at the source, but all you really need to know is that the ladies love a PC with paltry power consumption.
Researchers put smartphones on a power diet, drastically improve battery life
Nokia's Asha handsets already use browser compression to reduce data costs and power consumption for customers in the developing world, but the company's Finnish neighbours over at Aalto University have taken a totally different approach. By using a network proxy to squash traffic into bursts rather than a constant bit rate, and by forcing a smartphone's modem into idle mode between each burst, the researchers claim they can cut 3G power consumption by 74 percent. Now, we're fortunate enough to be surrounded by power outlets over here, but even we could use some of that.
Corning peels back the petals on Lotus Glass, promises low-power, high performance
The glass masters over at Corning are at it again. The same company that unleashed Gorilla Glass upon the world has now come out with a brand new, albeit less ferocious-sounding material, known as Corning Lotus Glass. Designed with LCD and OLED displays in mind, this substrate promises to deliver pristine picture quality without sucking up too much power. According to Corning, this performance is largely due to Lotus' thermal and dimensional stability, which allows for greater resolution and speedier response times. These thermal properties also allow it to maintain its form during especially hot processing, thereby avoiding any nasty warping effects. Corning Lotus Glass has already launched into production, but there's no word yet on when we can expect to see it pop up in commercial products. Head past the break for a rather florid press release.
Report: data centers accounted for just 1 to 1.5 percent of electricity use last year, Google claims less than 1 percent of that
You'd think, watching companies like Apple break ground on sprawling data centers, that the number of servers powering our untethered lives was on the rise. In a different decade, you might have been right. But not this one. According to a study prepared at the request of The New York Times, the number of servers in use has declined "significantly" since 2005. That's mostly because of the financial crisis of 2008, says lead researcher Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University, but we also can't discount the effect of more efficient technologies. What's more, he says, servers worldwide consume less energy than you might have guessed: they accounted for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of global electricity use in 2010. And while Google, the king of cloud computing, has been cagey about revealing just how many servers house its treasure trove of data, the company said that of that 1 to 1.5 percent, it accounted for less than 1 percent -- meaning, just a hundredth of a percent of all the electricity consumed last year. All told, data centers' energy consumption has risen 56 percent since 2005 -- a far cry from the EPAs 2007 prediction that this figure would double by 2010, with annual costs ballooning to $7.4 billion. Then again, this slower-than-expected growth could well be temporary. Though Koomey can't specify to what extent the financial crisis and technological advancements are to blame, he insists, broadly speaking, that we're primarily seeing fallout from the economic slowdown -- a stay of execution, of sorts, for those of us rooting for energy conservation.
Multi-core voltage regulator uses fast voltage scaling to curb your processor's wasteful habits
Your processor may be able to react to your every, fickle demand when it comes to churning out the numbers that make the magic happen, but when it comes to managing its own power it's a bit more lazy. Chips can throttle an individual core's consumption back, but do so slowly, a problem that Harvard grad student Wonyoung Kim appears to have solved. He's created an on-chip multi-core voltage regulator that uses what's called fast-voltage scaling, a technique of rapidly cutting power that could drastically extend battery life on mobile devices -- or, you know, make it so that your gaming rig doesn't dim the lights quite so badly when you crank it up to the gigahertz. No word on when this regulator will start making an appearance in consumer electronics, but Mr. Kim has achieved a patent for his work, so you can be sure he'll be making bank whenever it does.
IBM forms new partnership with ARM in hopes of developing ludicrously small chip processing technology
We've seen IBM and ARM team up before, but this week both companies announced a new joint initiative to develop 14nm chip processing technology. That's significantly smaller than the 20nm SoC technology ARM hopes to create in partnership with TSMC, and makes the company's previous work with IBM on 32nm semiconductors look like a cake walk. The potential benefits, though, are faster processors that require less power, and feature lower per unit manufacturing costs Who knows if or when we'll see tangible results from the tag team, but if IBM's Watson can beat Jeopardy champions, further reducing the average size of a feature that can be created on a chip should be elementary, right? To read over the full announcement check out the press release after the break.
'Steeper' project aims to boost electronics' power efficiency by 10x, eliminate vampire power
A research project with the lofty goal of reducing electronics' power consumption by ten times and virtually eliminating so-called vampire power may not ordinarily stand the best chance of being taken seriously, but this new initiative dubbed "Steeper" isn't exactly your ordinary research project. Led by IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (or EPFL), the EU-funded project will use nanotechnology in an attempt to reduce power consumption at the level of transistors and nanowires, with the ultimate goal being to reduce the operating voltage to less than 0.5 volts, thereby reducing overall power consumption by one order of magnitude. As you can see from the helpful chart above, simply cutting back on vampire power alone could put a big dent in power consumption, and the researchers also note that the project would obviously not only benefit consumer electronics, but super computers and other big sources of power consumption as well. Head on past the break for the complete press release.
Microsoft partners with Blue Line Innovation for Hohm-compatible monitoring device, we go hands-on
Microsoft's Hohm service has been going wild on the internets for just over a year, letting people who have signed on with partner utility companies to track their usage straight from the source. But, if you didn't find yourself in one of the 4.5 million homes currently covered by one of those utilities you were stuck counting electrons on your own. No more. Blue Line Innovations has launched its $249 Power Cost Monitor WiFi Edition with the ability to feed directly to Hohm, and we have all the details, plus some early impressions, after the break. %Gallery-98265%
ViewSonic outs energy efficient, earth-friendly VOT125 nettop -- won't help that there oil spill
Way back at CES in January, we spied ViewSonic's full offering, and we caught wind then of the VOT125 nettop -- but we didn't really have any details to go on. Well, the company's officially announced the VOT125 PC Mini today, and the slim little guy looks pretty cute. Sold as a space-saving PC with green design, ViewSonic says that the VOT125 uses up to 90 percent less plastic than similar nettops, and consumes up to 90 percent less power, making use of a range of ultra low power Intel ULV CPUs. The VOT125 boasts 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, four USB 2.0 ports, plus DVI / HDMI. You can grab one up starting today, and it's got a starting price of $499. The full PR follows.
Intel reaches for the 'smartphone zone' with Moorestown-based Atom Z6, comes up shorthanded
We've seen the future of Intel's mobile platform, and it isn't all roses and sunshine. Three years after the chipmaker told us Moorestown would reduce Atom's energy consumption by a factor of 20, company execs told us earlier today that they've more than reached that goal with the new Z6xx series. Problem is, in the smartphone realm Intel's competitors haven't been sitting idle; according to one of Chipzilla's cantaloupe-and-magenta bar charts, it seems the company has merely caught up in terms of battery life. That's not to say the chips aren't worlds better than previous Atoms -- Intel sees 1.5GHz smartphone processors that slay Snapdragons and up to 1.9GHz in a tablet PC variety -- but 5 hours of web browsing is most decidedly not the 24 hours of productivity Intel previously promised. Besides, who knows: Qualcomm also has a 1.5GHz SoC in the works, though it may not be available by the time Intel's chips ship in the second half of the year. None of this is to say that Intel won't continue to dominate in the netbook marketplace -- we shudder to think at the potential when combining a nice, chunky battery with Intel's nearly leakproof new chips, and perhaps a small serving of switchable graphics while we're at it. But without a single new MID or smartphone to show us this morning -- Aava Mobile and OpenPeak's offerings seemed unchanged from our previous encounters -- we're not sure if the company's other mobile ambitions have any sway. Not technical enough of a discussion for you? Peruse our gallery for the nitty-gritty. %Gallery-92318%
Intel's experimental sensor analyzes appliance power consumption from single outlet
It's pretty much set in silicon -- in the future, you will monitor your home power consumption, and perhaps even enjoy doing so. Futuristic touchscreen panels and free monitoring software abound, each designed to reward you with a warm, fuzzy Captain Planet feeling and a reduced energy bill when you finally turn off that blasted light. Thing is, unless you've got a home automation system, you won't know which switch to flip. Intel wants to change that with a new wireless sensor that can identify each individual appliance in your house by their unique electrical signal, just by plugging into a single outlet in your house. The reportedly low-cost sensor works by simply recognizing voltage drop patterns when devices are turned on and off, and doesn't require special appliances to function; Intel demonstrated it on a standard toaster, microwave and fridge in Beijing this week. Demonstrate your supreme demand for this "why didn't I think of that" idea by directing traffic to our source link -- you can jump to 20:10 to see the sensor in action. Update: Come to think of it, that looks just like a wireless version of Marvell's SheevaPlug.
Fujitsu's power strip graphs your electrical gluttony
We have a long wait before the world becomes solar powered, so between now and then we need to get a lot smarter about how much of the good stuff our gadgets are sucking down. Fujitsu's prototype power strip does just that -- with a little bit of help from a PC. Unlike other strips we've seen in the past, this one has a USB port on the side through which it feeds consumption data about each of its four outlets. From there users can graph the draw of each one and see which of their little vampires has the sharpest teeth. No price or availability was provided for this smart strip, so don't be too demeaning to your current dumb ones just yet.
Microsoft Hohm SDK is available to third parties, first devices to hit this summer
There are already plenty of solutions for monitoring your power consumption, particularly with Google's relatively recent PowerMeter ecosystem, but if you want to do things the Microsoft way, Microsoft's Hohm is about to get third party device friendly. An SDK has been recently released to manufacturers, and we're supposed to expect the first compatible products by the summer. Interestingly, Microsoft has also mentioned that it "might" even get into the game of energy hardware at some point. The end game is to feed back information and control to utilities to be able to load balance energy demand (charging up that fancy electric car of yours overnight instead of at 7pm, for instance), though that sort advance might be as much as a decade out.
Desktop PC components get rated for power efficiency, Intel rules the roost
With all the antitrust noise, threats to AMD, and conflicts with NVIDIA, it's hard to feel too charmed with Intel at the moment. But, if you're looking for the best combination of performance and power consumption possible, you'll have to swallow any animosity and put an Intel inside, with an efficiency piece at bit-tech.net finding that chips from that manufacturer were, on average, considerably more efficient than their AMD counterparts. That's just part of the story, the site testing everything from memory to power supplies and finding the best compromise of performance and efficiency. It's perhaps no surprise that high-efficiency PSUs trump older, hotter ones, but you might not expect to learn that desktop SSDs offer barely any improvement over their 5,400RPM platter-based brethren. Follow the article's advice and you can shed 104 watts without losing a single 3DMark point -- though you may shed quite a few dollars in the process.
Two new patents show Apple getting into the energy tracking game, killing power bricks
Apple may already be the favored child of Greenpeace and platform of choice for eco-minded gadgetistas worldwide, but it isn't resting on its laurels. The company looks like it's pondering an entrance into the home automation/energy tracking markets, filing for a pair of patents that would enable devices to register their power usage and communicate with each other using HomePlug Alliance standards. Users would be able to monitor the charging status of connected devices and delay their charges to occur during off-peak hours. There's even a new type of plug that could internally perform AC/DC conversions and automatically provide the appropriate amount of juice to any supporting device. The end of the ubiquitous power brick? Sounds nice, but something tells us it'll be a few decades before we can reclaim that precious space in our carry-ons.
SmartSynch intros GridRouter for smart meters and the electric companies that love them
The last time we heard from SmartSynch it had inked a deal with AT&T to provide communications between its smart energy products and power companies. Now the company's back with a little something called the GridRouter, an IP-based device based that connects appliances, smart grids, and utilities -- no matter which communication protocol is used. The device is built on an open platform since the current grid is a mish-mash (or a hodge-podge, if you will) of proprietary hardware and software, and includes WiMax and Wi-Fi capabilities. Sounds like it just might be the thing for utilities struggling to catch up to the 21st century smarter energy revolution -- and those of you who are really, really into Google's PowerMeter beta. Want to give it a spin? Hit the source link to get in touch with the company. PR after the break.
