Intel tries to reconcile global warming and Moore's Law

Stan Beer
Sunday, 08 June 2008 07:31

Opinion and Analysis

One can hardly blame Intel or even Microsoft for initiating the Wintel alliance. They're in business to make money and over the years, Wintel has arguably succeeded in dramatically lowering the cost of hardware and even software if you choose to go the open source route.

However, that still begs the same question. How do you reconcile the quest to put ever more powerful processors in personal computers, which already have millions of times the processing power of the computers that were used to put the first men on the moon, with reducing your carbon footprint?

The short answer is you don't. Unless you're a serious gamer or CAD engineer, anyone who buys even an average notebook computer from a corner store already has far more computing power than they should ever need.

Anyone who doubts the above statement should take a look at what you can do with a tiny relatively underpowered little sub-notebook like the Asus Eee PC.

If we're really serious about reducing the IT carbon footprint, it's time to bring both hardware and desktop software makers to account and let them know that less is more not Moore.