Power-efficient processors and memory reduce your carbon footprint

The tech industry runs on silicon chips; therefore, any initiative to reduce the carbon footprint and create greener options must start with the chips that sit at the center of all smart devices. Any solution must find a way to reduce the power consumption of billions of laptops, phones, tablets and in-vehicle systems everywhere.

The good news is that energy consumption has long been a priority for industry. Mobile device and laptop users demand long battery life and low chip power consumption. The screen is a simple way to provide a device that works for hours without being plugged in. Over the past few decades, steady progress has produced smartphones that deliver billions of times more computing power for the same amount of electricity.

At the same time, data center operators are also well aware that using electricity costs them twice. First, they want chips that can deliver the most performance per watt because electricity is one of the most important things to run centers. Second, all the electricity that goes into the computers is turned into heat, so the center also has to pay to remove it from the building.

These two market economic forces have driven chipmakers to produce greener chips with a lower carbon footprint. Even if the objective was only to save money, the economic dynamic is closely aligned with environmental imperatives.

Many companies are quick to celebrate their environmental awareness. Apple, for example, says it is carbon neutral for its global corporate operations, and by 2030 it aims to have "net zero climate impact across the business, which includes manufacturing supply chains and all product life cycles".

These forces are reflected in the market in many different and sometimes divergent ways. Here are some of the main ways the chip industry is building new hardware that minimizes the carbon footprint of computing.

Apple's new M1 and M2 chips offer a new solution that integrates processors used for general computing (CPU) and graphics processing (GPU) on one main chip. Most computers today use separate chips, often on separate circuit boards, to perform the same tasks. Apple chips share the same memory and use tight integration to deliver dramatically faster speeds for many tasks that require both the CPU and GPU to work closely together.

While much of the commercial literature focuses on increasing speed, tight integration and shared resources also significantly reduce power consumption. In its announcement of the M2, Apple boasted that when comparing its new laptops to a competing PC (Samsung Galaxy with an i7), its chip "matches its peak performance using one-fifth the power". /p> Adopt ARM chips

While the processor market has been dominated by the venerable Intel or x86 architecture for decades, a number of users have recently switched to ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) architecture, in part because chips using the instruction set of this architecture offers more calculation for less electricity.

Amazon, for example, touts its Graviton 2 and Graviton 3 chips, which it designed in-house and installed in data centers. When users recompile code into the new instruction set, Amazon estimates that it's not uncommon for the code to use 60% less electricity than its regular instances. Actual savings vary by app.

AWS users never see the electricity bill, but Amazon passes the savings on to instance pricing. Its ARM machines would cost around 30% less for roughly the same computing power. In some cases, users don't even know they're saving money. AWS has quietly moved some of the managed services like Aurora Database to ARM instances.

Amazon is far from the only company exploring the ARM architecture. A number of other companies are building ARM-based servers and reporting similar blackout successes. Qualcomm, for example, is reportedly working with major and minor cloud providers to use its ARM chips. It also recently acquired Nuvia, a startup that was designing its own ARM chips. ...