HP Looks To Improve Power Management Coordination

tringtring writes "Computer World reports on an HP Labs researcher who foretells a future in which power management features will be built into the processor, memory, server, software and cooling systems. Coordination will be paramount. 'What happens if you turn all these elements on at the same time?' the principal research scientist at HP Labs asks. 'How do I make sure that the system doesn't explode?' This future is the vision of Parthasarathy Ranganathan, the man behind the "No Power Struggles" project at Hewlett-Packard. Power management systems will have to operate holistically, without one component conflicting with another, Ranganathan says. Ranganathan is just one of many researchers at the tech industry's biggest labs researching on how future data centers will handle increasing demands for processing capability and energy efficiency while simplifying IT."

Amen.

My 10 year old HP laptop gets 5hr 45min on a freshly charged battery. The one I'm sitting at right now barely gets 2hr. It's about time they get back to where they were.

Re:Amen.

So you have 10 times the computing power (to be conservative)but over a third the battery life as your old unit. It's called a tradeoff. You can't compare apples to oranges.

Re:Amen.

I also have a battery with twice the volume and a chemistry with 4x the energy density of the old laptop's battery. Not to mention that this battery is much newer and in better overall condition. I have 8x the battery capacity and ~3x the CPU power (1600Mhz vs 475Mhz). Factor in the fact that the older laptop has an internal floppy drive as well as DVD drive, where the newer laptop lacks the floppy drive, a hard disk that draws 5 watts more than the one in the newer laptop. I should be seeing nearly thrice the battery life by your logic.

You made the assumption that I had a 4750Mhz CPU, the same peripherals, the same size battery with the same battery chemistry and that similar peripherals use the same amount of power. You also failed to account for power management systems that are present in current laptops, which did not exist 10 years ago. Yet another thing you failed to account for is the supposed increase in efficiency (and decrease in overall power consumption) claimed by PC manufacturers, especially with regard to laptops. You even forgot to account for the age of the battery; 10 years vs. a week-old warranty replacement of a less-than-nine-month-old battery.

I have a battery with 8x the capacity in a system with less hardware and a supposedly more efficient CPU which is only about 3x faster, components which claim lower power consumption and over all better power management than my 10 year old laptop from the same manufacturer. Why am I seeing 1/3 the battery life of the old system rather than the 3x increase logic and mathematics tell me I should be seeing?

Someone, somewhere, is lying and it's not me.

Oh, and... first post! :)

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"You made the assumption that I had a 4750Mhz CPU"

You made the assumption that to be 10x faster, a CPU needs to run at 10x the speed. The top Intel CPU on this chart is 3200 Mhz, and is 10x faster than the bottom (2800 Mhz).

Remember - Moore's law is about

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Why am I seeing 1/3 the battery life of the old system rather than the 3x increase logic and mathematics tell me I should be seeing?

It's the processor, you have to power that huge pipeline, it's also the motherboard. And for Quad core, heck that's 95W

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All they have to do is look at the work being done on OXs by OLPC, cause that is exactly what they are doing to get their extra long battery life.

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Wait till you plug in an HP All In One printer. You'll get 15 desktop icons and a bunch of Taskbar quick launch icons. With 30 new high priority processes using half your CPU and all your memory, your battery life will drop to minutes, assuming your machin

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The real question is: what the hell is software doing with all these resources? Why is it always on the shoulders of hardware to improve power specs? I have an idea: how about not requiring billions of processor cycles to support the 12 layers of indirecti

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Both are HP. I thought I made that clear in my original post. I should also state that the CPU is less than 2x as fast as the older laptop when running on battery (it scales back to 800Mhz) and I have the backlight set to drop to 40% when running on batter

What the hell are HP selling now?

"What happens if you turn all these elements on at the same time?" the principal research scientist at HP Labs asks. "How do I make sure that the system doesn't explode?"

That's certainly a worry for me. The last thing I want when I turn on a "processor, memory, server, software and cooling systems" is for the system to explode. Being a dedicated slashdotter, and therefore Linux user, I have little worry that the software will cause any manner of combustion event, but I'd never really considered the dangers of using a processor and memory at the same time. I was thinking of getting more RAM, but given that I'm already running a dual-core, perhaps I should hold off on the extra gig until I hear from HP.

Hint: step 1 is user-control

Step 1 is user control for turning up the cooling features. If the user determines that the fans should run faster then the fans should run faster regardless of what the "holisitic" system thinks.

Seriously, this is the single biggest problem with the current HP DL360. The fans turn down to 30% and the memory overheats. A simple BIOS option to set the minimum fan speed to 60% would solve this.

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as long as there is override for when you set a max speed and the system gets to hot.

Automatic is better

The crap design you mention is jsut that: a crap design. It is possible to make a good automatic design.

How many cars these days have manual chokes, advance/retard, mixture settings etc? None. They are all automatic. Give a user a knob and they will fiddle with it and break the system.

Solution in search of a problem...

What happens if you turn all these elements on at the same time?' the principal research scientist at HP Labs asks. 'How do I make sure that the system doesn't explode?

I can't say as I've ever worried about that.

first task...

dont make it dependent on ACPI...

Although it seems bizarre

There is something to this. In a data center, if you have a brown-out or full power drop, the strain on power systems to restore power are what can only be described as epic.

When you take a 1400 amp back up system and drop it up and down like a yo-yo in a lightning storm, stress tends to bring out the worst of Murphy's Law. If all the components in a data center were orchestrated, that can be mitigated. It can be mitigated into nearly 'not a worry' status.

Monitors? low priority in most cases. Redundant supplies, in some cases bring them up separately. Cooling fans could be delayed by some seconds depending on usage. It may seem negligent power use, but on startup each system will draw it's max current, and when all do at the same instant, the peak draw can be overwhelming. In fact, computers themselves could bring up hardware in an orchestrated manner to reduce the startup surge.

In addition to this, by adding power management, it's possible to reduce data center power use also. If you monitored temp and turned off fans when not needed, less power used, less heat generated, less cooling needed overall. If all hardware were built in such a way the hardware on a quad nic card that is not used could be powered off after configuration... as an example. Nic cards could be the last thing to be powered up.

This type of design is practically rocket science. If you look at systems that go into space you will see that they count every milliamp of current draw and manage it with precision. Power use is a big concern for space craft.

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In addition to this, by adding power management, it's possible to reduce data center power use also. If you monitored temp and turned off fans when not needed, less power used, less heat generated, less cooling needed overall. If all hardware were built in

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Believe it or not, I like to have audio indication on many systems. I am at the point now that hearing certain sounds in conjunction with other events lets me know instinctively what is happening. I'm reasonably certain that one or two power outages would

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What does WoL matter when the machine is already being powered up?

also go to a dc power bus for the data center

dropping ac to dc psu in each system and replacing them with dc to dc ones will drop heat and power use.

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How so? You've replaced the AC input to the power supply with a DC input, at a lower voltage and with increased transmission losses. Whatever the input, it gets converted into AC in the voltage regulator.

Enterprise users will pay big $ for this

So when you're purchasing power from the grid and you're metered not on use, but on peak draw, this will save you a LOT of money. Coordinating the power on of a number of systems which draw a lot at power on verses their normal draw (think turning on 100 laser printers all at the same time!).

Finally!

Someone is finally dealing with the mess that is power cord management.

Oh wait... nevermind.

BIOS & the OS

Improving power management in the hardware is a good idea, then again the problem is probably simpler. Currently PCs uses a power management protocol that doesn't seem to be easy to understand and in certain case just badly implemented. It really gets on m

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simple: don't use sony batteries ?