[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
---- Original Message ----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: OT: Energy efficiency difference btw GNU/Linux, Mac & MS
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:27:55 -0700
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 07:55:56AM +0100, andy wrote:
Hello all
As part of my studies I must draw up a spec for providing a
hypothetical
building with power sourced solely from renewables (solar, PV,
wind).
This building is an educational establishment for about 20 people
using
computers. The budget is (naturally) tight.
Logically, before one powers a building, one needs to ensure that
the
existing loads are the most efficient that they can be so that the
supply is not being wasted by hungry loads.
What I want to find out is whether anyone here knows of any
studies/reports that identifies whether or not there is a
difference in
the energy efficiency among GNU/Linux systems, Mac and Microsoft.
I bet it's pretty hard to find a reasonable, non-biased study about
this, but if you find one, I'd be intrigued.
I can easily make the argument that licensing and maintenance
costs
would be cheaper using GNU/Linux, as well as recommending either a
system of laptops and/or a system of thin clients.
ISTM that regardless of who's software is more efficient, arguably
the
best method is thin clients, from an energy perspecitve. This is
based
on the assumption that you will have a few 24/7 machines anyway. And
that points, at least in my mind, a little bit towards OSS because
of
the inexpensive virtualization options. A few physical machines
running at nearly full capacity seems to me to be more energy
efficient than a bunch of machines running at lower loads.
But that is all idle speculation around the water cooler.
A
IMHO it would be difficult, from an energy perspective, to
differentiate between any of several O/Ss, each of which ran on an
identical CPU. The major contributors to power dissipation are
usually the power supply, the HDD and to a lessor degree the fan.
The energy consumed by the CPU is considerably less than that of the
power supply (by perhaps a factor of 5) and that of memory even less.
That having been said, however, it is certainly true that the less
memory required the less energy required and the smaller HDD
required, the less energy. Both of these favor the *IX varients.
The last factor would be the speed of operation (the lower the speed,
especially with DRAM, the less energy required), but I can't make a
case one way or the other since most try and run the CPU at maximum.
Larry
Larry, Ron, Sam & Andrew
Thank you all for your comments. I think what I will do then is to
propose that the site acquire better energy efficiency via a couple of
servers running our fave distro (so much for scientific objectivity!!)
and using thin clients with various energy savings options enabled for
monitors, etc. Sam (via a private email) recommended the XO-1 or
Classmate or Eee PCs as the most suitable candidate machines, so I will
see what more I can find out on those in the meantime.
Once again, many thanks for sharing your opinions.
Cheers
Andy
--
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the
answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
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