| August 2, 2010 9:00 PM PDT | |
By Nancy Nicolaisen
My first exposure to Intel® Atom™ microarchitecture was as a by-product of a search for a durable, low-cost, powerful platform for ultra-mobile field science applications. I can say, without reservation, that Intel® Atom™ processor-based devices are superlative in this use case. What I learned about their relative "greenness" came later, and so I want to be clear about one thing from the outset: Few people in the technology industry have the luxury of choosing solutions exclusively because they are green. When a few cents of additional cost in a bill of materials can make the difference between a profitable design and a complete loser, the bottom line is very often where the decision gets made about what to build.
However, if the best candidate also turns out to be the most environmentally friendly one, then we end up with a double win, and this is worth knowing. Appreciating the green manufacturing process, operating characteristics, and life cycle management opportunities you deliver into your customers' hands is a form of situational awareness in the technology development process. Even if you didn't set out to be green, increasingly, both consumers and enterprise customers evaluate purchases with this in mind. Published figures for the number of consumers that take environmental considerations into account when making purchases put the share at around 77 percent overall, with higher numbers for the 18-24 age group, which is disproportionately represented among game consumers.
This year, for the first time, you can leverage good environmental product design, because there is a way to make green claims stick. Underwriters Laboratories (UL), the same institution that labels a wide variety of consumer products as being certifiably compliant with safety and quality standards, is providing certification for products that meet energy and sustainability standards as well as third-party validation of environmental claims (see Figure 1).
UL's green claims validation process contemplates better than a dozen aspects of sustainability and reasonable behavior regarding waste streams. On its own, the Intel® Atom™ processor could qualify for consideration in terms of energy efficiency, water efficiency, and freedom from hazardous and toxic substances content.
Getting the Lead Out-Literally
Lead has the highest atomic weight of all stable elements and is used in a variety of applications, including solder, fireproofing, and fusible alloys. Because of its malleability, low melting temperature, and ease of rendering from ore-bearing rock, lead has been widely used for centuries. For this reason, it is virtually ubiquitous, and every living human has some measurable level of lead present in his or her blood-not good news, because it is a powerful neurotoxin, bioaccumulating in both soft tissue and bone. In young children, lead toxicity causes life-long learning disabilities and behavioral problems; in adults, it can permanently impair heart, kidney, intestine, and reproductive function (see Figure 2).
Lead accumulation in humans occurs as a result of exposure to contaminated air, water, soil, food, or consumer products. Because of its chemical stability, lead is particularly persistent in the environment, being capable of long-distance transport via wind and water.
Heavy metals and a handful of other persistent organic pollutants are so serious a problem that in one of the first initiatives after its creation, the European Union (EU) established regulations limiting use of six hazardous substances commonly found in electronics:
Intel, in contrast, invested six years and millions of dollars to design and produce a family of processors that exceed the EU restrictions on lead. No lead is used, anywhere.
Going Halogen Free
In addition to losing the lead, the Intel® Atom™ family of processors is halogen free. Halogen compounds (including the last two on the EU list shown above) have long been used in a variety of applications (think textiles, appliances, and electronics) as flame retardants (HFRs). They do this by escalating the temperature at which plastics and resin-based items like circuit boards ignite. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that scientists began to investigate what happens when halogen-based HFRs actually do ignite at high temperatures. The discoveries were sobering.
Combustion products from high-temperature HFR fires can include dioxins and furans, two of the most teratogenic and carcinogenic families of compounds known to man. Here are the key things to understand about the health and environmental risks of burning HFRs:
As a result of these and other studies, most states and the U.S. Government restrict what materials can be dispose of by burning.
Increasingly, however, waste electronics are being shipped abroad by fraudulent "recycling" operations. This so called "e-trash" is the fastest growing waste stream globally, with over 50 million tons being dumped annually-mostly in Africa but also in China and India. Devices including computers, monitors, cell phones, printers, televisions, and medical equipment are sold to small-scale salvage businesses. The e-trash serves as raw material from which workers render copper and lead by burning in open bonfires. The fires burn for as long as necessary to incinerate plastics, making metal constituents easily recoverable. Workers are frequently children.
Open burning of e-trash poisons workers, irreparably contaminates soil and ground water, and creates perverse incentives in the e-waste recycling industry. In addition, released airborne pollutants are readily distributed globally by atmospheric circulation. EPA studies conducted to determine the rate of travel of airborne heavy metal contaminants showed that starting from various locations in North America, in 5 to 10 days, airborne pollutants can traverse the entire continent (see Figure 5).
Like lead, the combustion products from halogenated fire-suppression materials are extremely stable. Once released into the environment as noxious effluent, they will be there for a long, long time. Last year, over 500,000 waste personal computers were reportedly delivered to Lagos, Nigeria, as "used goods." There weren't 500,000 consumers lined up to take them home and plug them in.
There are two common ways computers waste energy:
The Green Cloud
We are upon the threshold of the era of the cloud, and cloud computing may turn out to be the greenest thing to hit the planet since crop rotation. Here's why: In the same way cell phones have changed our expectations about connectedness with people, cloud computing will change our beliefs about connectedness to services, information, and management of computing infrastructure. Consider the first item in the energy wasting list above.
In an architecture where powerful, ubiquitous, lightweight "viewer" devices access resources and assets stored and managed in the cloud, there is no incentive to overprovision. You can pay as you go for a desired level of service and cheaply enjoy the benefits of specialized infrastructure made affordable by economies of scale. This delivers savings in the individual or enterprise case through lower capital, staffing, and energy costs; it provides improved environmental stewardship in the aggregate case through optimized resource utilization.
Conserve Power by Needing Less
Leaving an Intel® Atom™ processor-based device in a power-on standby status has a considerably reduced carbon footprint compared to doing the same thing using hardware running on bigger, faster, hotter processors. Quoting from a paper entitled "A Sub-1W to 2W Low-Power IA Processor for Mobile Internet Devices and Ultra-Mobile PCs" by Gianfranco Gerosa et al., presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference of 2008:
"This paper describes a low-power Intel® Architecture (IA) processor specifically designed for Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC) where average power consumed is on the order of a few hundred mW (as measured by MobileMark'05 OP @ 60 nits brightness) with performance similar to mainstream Ultra-Mobile PCs." [Emphasis mine.]
Average power use measured in milliwatts needs little further elaboration, and this result was published almost two years ago. Power and thermal efficiency advances continue for Intel® Atom™ processors. The year 2010 saw the introduction of next-generation technology, the Intel® Atom™ Z6xx series processors. Devices built on these platforms will benefit from stunning reductions in power consumption, benchmarking as follows:
Obviating the effect of physical distance automatically rewrites the rules about the way we use all types of resources to work, play, learn, and form communities. Ultramobility is a cultural and environmental game changer for this reason, and Intel® Atom™ microarchitecture has done more to get us there than any other single influence.
Download Article
Download Green Computing with Intel® Atom™ Processor-Based Devices [PDF 825KB]My first exposure to Intel® Atom™ microarchitecture was as a by-product of a search for a durable, low-cost, powerful platform for ultra-mobile field science applications. I can say, without reservation, that Intel® Atom™ processor-based devices are superlative in this use case. What I learned about their relative "greenness" came later, and so I want to be clear about one thing from the outset: Few people in the technology industry have the luxury of choosing solutions exclusively because they are green. When a few cents of additional cost in a bill of materials can make the difference between a profitable design and a complete loser, the bottom line is very often where the decision gets made about what to build.
However, if the best candidate also turns out to be the most environmentally friendly one, then we end up with a double win, and this is worth knowing. Appreciating the green manufacturing process, operating characteristics, and life cycle management opportunities you deliver into your customers' hands is a form of situational awareness in the technology development process. Even if you didn't set out to be green, increasingly, both consumers and enterprise customers evaluate purchases with this in mind. Published figures for the number of consumers that take environmental considerations into account when making purchases put the share at around 77 percent overall, with higher numbers for the 18-24 age group, which is disproportionately represented among game consumers.
This year, for the first time, you can leverage good environmental product design, because there is a way to make green claims stick. Underwriters Laboratories (UL), the same institution that labels a wide variety of consumer products as being certifiably compliant with safety and quality standards, is providing certification for products that meet energy and sustainability standards as well as third-party validation of environmental claims (see Figure 1).
UL's green claims validation process contemplates better than a dozen aspects of sustainability and reasonable behavior regarding waste streams. On its own, the Intel® Atom™ processor could qualify for consideration in terms of energy efficiency, water efficiency, and freedom from hazardous and toxic substances content.
Clean Manufacturing
Perhaps the most under-reported achievement of the Intel® Atom™ processor is the one for which it most deserves attention: the Intel® Atom™ processor is a member of the first family of Intel® processors to claim a completely lead- and halogen-free manufacturing process-an accomplishment that took six years of research and development to achieve.Getting the Lead Out-Literally
Lead has the highest atomic weight of all stable elements and is used in a variety of applications, including solder, fireproofing, and fusible alloys. Because of its malleability, low melting temperature, and ease of rendering from ore-bearing rock, lead has been widely used for centuries. For this reason, it is virtually ubiquitous, and every living human has some measurable level of lead present in his or her blood-not good news, because it is a powerful neurotoxin, bioaccumulating in both soft tissue and bone. In young children, lead toxicity causes life-long learning disabilities and behavioral problems; in adults, it can permanently impair heart, kidney, intestine, and reproductive function (see Figure 2).
Lead accumulation in humans occurs as a result of exposure to contaminated air, water, soil, food, or consumer products. Because of its chemical stability, lead is particularly persistent in the environment, being capable of long-distance transport via wind and water.
Heavy metals and a handful of other persistent organic pollutants are so serious a problem that in one of the first initiatives after its creation, the European Union (EU) established regulations limiting use of six hazardous substances commonly found in electronics:
- Lead
- Mercury
- Cadmium
- Hexavalent chromium
- Polybrominated biphenyls
- Polybrominated diphenyl ether
Intel, in contrast, invested six years and millions of dollars to design and produce a family of processors that exceed the EU restrictions on lead. No lead is used, anywhere.
Going Halogen Free
In addition to losing the lead, the Intel® Atom™ family of processors is halogen free. Halogen compounds (including the last two on the EU list shown above) have long been used in a variety of applications (think textiles, appliances, and electronics) as flame retardants (HFRs). They do this by escalating the temperature at which plastics and resin-based items like circuit boards ignite. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that scientists began to investigate what happens when halogen-based HFRs actually do ignite at high temperatures. The discoveries were sobering.
Combustion products from high-temperature HFR fires can include dioxins and furans, two of the most teratogenic and carcinogenic families of compounds known to man. Here are the key things to understand about the health and environmental risks of burning HFRs:
- Dioxin and dioxin-like compounds are persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which means that they don't readily degrade through chemical, biologic, or photolytic processes.
- Because they are such durable compounds, they are readily transported over long distances by movement in air and water.
- They bioaccumulate in human and animal tissue.
- They biomagnify in food chains.
- Dioxin and dioxin-like compounds are not intentionally manufactured for any purpose. The dominant environmental input is open burning of trash and in particular, e-trash.
Figure 3. The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 established the International Joint Commission/Commission Mixte International, under which the governments of the United States and Canada collaborate to monitor, assess, and remediate water and air quality issues of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. This area is the largest freshwater complex on earth and, owing to its cultural history and huge surface area, has had significant problems with accumulation of toxic pollutants in its plant, animal, and human communities. The image above is a depiction of a Great Lakes food web, showing the paths by which POPs bioaccumulate and biomagnify in plants, animals, and people. (Taken from the IJC-CMI 11th Biennial Report on Great Lakes Water Quality, available at http://www.ijc.org/php/publications/html/11br/english/report/index.html.)
Facing the E-trash Issue
Today, the principal source of atmospheric dioxin and furan family compounds is open burning. Sometimes, this is simply a matter of people burning personal household trash. EPA and the New York State Department of Health conducted a joint study to analyze the impacts of open-barrel burning of household trash. For some combustion products, the toxic effluent produced by burning 10 pounds of household trash per day was equivalent to the output of a well-controlled commercial incinerator burning 400,000 pounds of trash per day (see Figure 4).As a result of these and other studies, most states and the U.S. Government restrict what materials can be dispose of by burning.
Increasingly, however, waste electronics are being shipped abroad by fraudulent "recycling" operations. This so called "e-trash" is the fastest growing waste stream globally, with over 50 million tons being dumped annually-mostly in Africa but also in China and India. Devices including computers, monitors, cell phones, printers, televisions, and medical equipment are sold to small-scale salvage businesses. The e-trash serves as raw material from which workers render copper and lead by burning in open bonfires. The fires burn for as long as necessary to incinerate plastics, making metal constituents easily recoverable. Workers are frequently children.
Open burning of e-trash poisons workers, irreparably contaminates soil and ground water, and creates perverse incentives in the e-waste recycling industry. In addition, released airborne pollutants are readily distributed globally by atmospheric circulation. EPA studies conducted to determine the rate of travel of airborne heavy metal contaminants showed that starting from various locations in North America, in 5 to 10 days, airborne pollutants can traverse the entire continent (see Figure 5).
Like lead, the combustion products from halogenated fire-suppression materials are extremely stable. Once released into the environment as noxious effluent, they will be there for a long, long time. Last year, over 500,000 waste personal computers were reportedly delivered to Lagos, Nigeria, as "used goods." There weren't 500,000 consumers lined up to take them home and plug them in.
You Can't Talk Green Without Talking Energy
What happens when a processor is manufactured happens once. Likewise, what happens when it is recycled (or not) happens once. It is true that the impacts of these activities can have long-lasting and even devastating effects. However, for several years in between those two events, there will be a "daily life," and how a device goes about its business during that time matters exceedingly for purposes of energy impact and carbon footprint.There are two common ways computers waste energy:
- The waste can be present as excess capacity for an IT operation that has overprovisioned to ensure that it will have the necessary resources when computing demand peaks.
- The computer can be left on when it isn't actually in use, so that it will be rapidly available for ad hoc use.
The Green Cloud
We are upon the threshold of the era of the cloud, and cloud computing may turn out to be the greenest thing to hit the planet since crop rotation. Here's why: In the same way cell phones have changed our expectations about connectedness with people, cloud computing will change our beliefs about connectedness to services, information, and management of computing infrastructure. Consider the first item in the energy wasting list above.
In an architecture where powerful, ubiquitous, lightweight "viewer" devices access resources and assets stored and managed in the cloud, there is no incentive to overprovision. You can pay as you go for a desired level of service and cheaply enjoy the benefits of specialized infrastructure made affordable by economies of scale. This delivers savings in the individual or enterprise case through lower capital, staffing, and energy costs; it provides improved environmental stewardship in the aggregate case through optimized resource utilization.
Conserve Power by Needing Less
Leaving an Intel® Atom™ processor-based device in a power-on standby status has a considerably reduced carbon footprint compared to doing the same thing using hardware running on bigger, faster, hotter processors. Quoting from a paper entitled "A Sub-1W to 2W Low-Power IA Processor for Mobile Internet Devices and Ultra-Mobile PCs" by Gianfranco Gerosa et al., presented at the International Solid State Circuits Conference of 2008:
"This paper describes a low-power Intel® Architecture (IA) processor specifically designed for Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC) where average power consumed is on the order of a few hundred mW (as measured by MobileMark'05 OP @ 60 nits brightness) with performance similar to mainstream Ultra-Mobile PCs." [Emphasis mine.]
Average power use measured in milliwatts needs little further elaboration, and this result was published almost two years ago. Power and thermal efficiency advances continue for Intel® Atom™ processors. The year 2010 saw the introduction of next-generation technology, the Intel® Atom™ Z6xx series processors. Devices built on these platforms will benefit from stunning reductions in power consumption, benchmarking as follows:
- More than 50 times less at processor idle
- More than 20 times less for audio
- More than two times less for video playback and connected browsing
Ultramobility Is the New Normal
When considering the history of personal computing, one more-or-less rigid constraint imposed limits from T0 until the netbook. To access serious resources, you had to be where they were, or at least near the right infrastructure to bridge you to them fairly frequently (think wall power, high-bandwidth Internet access, climate-controlled environments, chairs, etc.). Imagine the vast amounts of energy that could be saved if, no matter where we all were, no one had to get in a car or on an airplane (unless they wanted to) to connect with colleagues, customers, and companions (see Figure 6).Figure 6. Increasingly, we expect to work, play, and connect from wherever we happen to find ourselves. (Composite image created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC, available at http://www.nersc.gov/news/science/quantumsecrets.php.)
Obviating the effect of physical distance automatically rewrites the rules about the way we use all types of resources to work, play, learn, and form communities. Ultramobility is a cultural and environmental game changer for this reason, and Intel® Atom™ microarchitecture has done more to get us there than any other single influence.
About the Author
Nancy Nicolaisen is an author, researcher and veteran software developer specializing in mobile and embedded device technologies. Her feature articles, columns and analyses have been internationally circulated in publications including BYTE, PC Magazine, Windows Sources, Computer Shopper, Dr. Dobbs Journal of Software Engineering, Microsoft Systems Journal; She is author of three books: Making Windows Portable: Porting Win32 to Win CE (2002, John Wiley & Sons); The Practical Guide to Debugging 32 Bit Windows Applications (1996, McGraw Hill); and The Visual Guide to Visual C++ (1994, Ventana Press) available in five foreign language editions. In 2007 she served as technical advisor for the development of the Microsoft Professional Education course titled "Designing, Building and Managing Wireless Networks". Ms. Nicolaisen is currently active in exploring open source technologies and trends for mobile, embedded and wireless devices.For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.
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| November 15, 2010 4:06 AM PST
computer_shop17
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hi dear sir |
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