Power Bits
By Ed Sperling
Jan. 14, 2010—The current raft of companies emphasizing low power is growing. What’s changing is it’s no longer just limited to the portable market, where battery life is critical, or even the corporate data center, where reducing power on thousands of servers can save big bucks.
Via Technologies this week rolled out a compact server for the home office and small business market that utilizes its own 64-bit low-power processors and chipsets, which normally are used in laptops.
AMD’s ATI video card unit also unveiled a new GPU that draws significantly less power than previous versions. In idle mode, it draws only 15 watts, and at maximum power it runs only 64 watts. Given the fact that this is a high-definition graphics engine attached to a plug, this is a major step forward—particularly in the PC gaming world where power carries the same bragging rights as horsepower on a sports car.
Media Excel and Texas Instruments, meanwhile, are collaborating on low-power versions of network-based transcoding electronics for HD, scalable video. This deal is aimed at the MobileTV, WebTV and IPTV world, which has steadily been gaining adherents even if it hasn’t replaced regular television. Most of these units rely on a plug, although they have slipped under the radar screen of regulators looking to cut power consumption in large-screen TVs.
Tags: AMD, ATI, Media Excel, Texas Instruments, Via Technologies