Last year AMD took out full-page ads in major newspapers to challenge Intel to a performance duel between their respective chips (Intel never accepted.)
Now AMD is poking Intel in the eye over what may be an even more important issue in computing -- power consumption -- and doing it in a way that is sure to get attention. On May 2, AMD put up digital billboards which will tally what it says is the amount of money spent on electricity bills by companies running Intel-based servers.
They will run through the end of the year. The billboards are inspired by the national debt clock near New York's Times Square, and they started counting at the $1 billion mark, adding roughly $24 a second. One billboard is situated in Times Square only blocks away from the debt clock that inspired it. The other is along U.S. Highway 101, in a spot where it is sure to be seen by Silicon Valley executives on their daily commute.
AMD says the first $1 billion in its calculation is related to the number of Intel-based server processors sold since April, 2003, when AMD introduced its competing Opteron line of server processors, through the end of 2005. It assumes those processors, which power the massive server computers that run Web sites and corporate data networks, were running at about 70% of their computing capacity, at a cost of about 13 cents per kilowatt hour.
Last year, Google engineer Luiz Andre Barroso published a paper warning that power costs could outweigh hardware expenses if power consumption weren't brought under better control.
Now AMD is poking Intel in the eye over what may be an even more important issue in computing -- power consumption -- and doing it in a way that is sure to get attention. On May 2, AMD put up digital billboards which will tally what it says is the amount of money spent on electricity bills by companies running Intel-based servers.
They will run through the end of the year. The billboards are inspired by the national debt clock near New York's Times Square, and they started counting at the $1 billion mark, adding roughly $24 a second. One billboard is situated in Times Square only blocks away from the debt clock that inspired it. The other is along U.S. Highway 101, in a spot where it is sure to be seen by Silicon Valley executives on their daily commute.
AMD says the first $1 billion in its calculation is related to the number of Intel-based server processors sold since April, 2003, when AMD introduced its competing Opteron line of server processors, through the end of 2005. It assumes those processors, which power the massive server computers that run Web sites and corporate data networks, were running at about 70% of their computing capacity, at a cost of about 13 cents per kilowatt hour.
Last year, Google engineer Luiz Andre Barroso published a paper warning that power costs could outweigh hardware expenses if power consumption weren't brought under better control.
. Except Stability, Power Consumption and maybe extra Features.
hyeah:
.