Good office mates

The modern PC is a marvel of engineering. Its most often overlooked, yet most vital component is the cooling system. I’m not taking this column completely over the geeky edge with an ode to fans and heatsinks, but little-recognized innovators like Taisol and Zalman deserve some kind of award. Without companies like theirs, 3 GHz PCs wouldn’t exist. Take a look at the lengths to which system manufacturers go to move the heat away from your computer’s chips.

Imagine spending all day sitting three feet from a whole rack of flame-belching silicon beasts that make the aft seat on a 747 seem serene. The human discomfort caused by vendors’ megahertz madness has come into focus as more workers share space with computers.

Server and equipment racks are springing up in cubicles, hallways, and even workers’ homes. Where dedicated data centers exist, employees often share that space with machines because square footage is at a premium. This is happening in concert with consolidation. If you’re asked to share a room with a server “just for a little while,” you’re likely to find two, then four, then who-knows-how-many machines in your space in the coming months.

Personally, I am more productive during the winter months because I can close the furnace vent over my head and open the windows. My lab has machines I can only run when it’s below 50 degrees outside. I have a hard-disk test bench downstairs that turns itself off when it gets too hot. And to tolerate the din of my equipment I often have to wear the nerdiest pair of padded headphones you’ve ever seen.

This is all because of the megahertz war that, I admit, I egged on. It was exciting to watch and report, but critical design issues like heat, noise, and power consumption got sidelined by AMD and Intel in favor of leapfrogging each other’s benchmark results by 5 or 10 percent. The shoot out was worth it. I can’t imagine what the world would be like if Intel had gone unchallenged in PC hardware. But at some point, I was secretly hoping that one side or the other would answer not with something 10 percent faster, but with something 50 percent cooler and quieter.

How, you might wonder, are heat and noise a chipmaker’s problem? After all, there are companies that make quiet computers using the same chips one finds in other computers. As many readers pointed out after my last column mentioning the subject, the noise problem can be solved with baffles, more efficient heat sinks, and specially engineered fans. I’ll spend more time looking at the best of these approaches. I already know the technology has advanced beyond what’s seen in mainstream computers.

But if you look at most of the mainstream solutions, they’re designed for quiet operation under optimal conditions. It’s easy to design a computer that’s sometimes quiet, but much harder to create one that’s always quiet. If the room temperature rises or the load on the processor increases, the fans that spin silently in the showroom speed up and start buzzing. Fans that remain idle at 70 degrees kick in when the room temperature hits 78 degrees. A box will do whatever it must to keep from leaving scorch marks on the carpet. It doesn’t care about your comfort.

Last year, coincidental with the megahertz wars, there took hold a hopeful phenomenon in the entry-level server space. Customers that were expected to snap up the new Xeons were opting instead for the less glamorous Pentium III in surprising numbers. IT buys these because they nail the dual-processor value/performance sweet spot perfectly. The only drawback was that Intel didn’t invest much R&D in Pentium III, so there was a risk that this cooler, more efficient processor would be orphaned.

Not any more. Centrino’s Pentium-M CPU is what Pentium 4 would have been if its designers had been shooting for optimal performance rather than unbridled clock speed. Pentium-M retains everything that’s good about Pentium III. It adds a slightly deeper pipeline, Pentium 4’s multimedia instructions, a huge on-chip cache, and new features targeted specifically at improving performance at lower clock speeds. Those lower speeds come into play when Pentium-M downshifts to conserve power, something it does naturally, and from what I can see so far, with a significant improvement in battery life, heat, and noise.

Gateway sent me a 450XL notebook so I could take a look at the Centrino platform and use a portable machine for Windows 2003 Server testing on the road. The 450XL is a loaded notebook that’s a tad heavier than I prefer to carry. But Gateway’s Centrino machine is a great demo of Intel’s mobile platform. It really performs. Frankly, configured with 1 GB of DDR RAM, the 450XL is better at running Windows 2003 Server than most of the single-processor servers in my lab. This is the first PC notebook I’ve considered using that did a credible job of running a server OS.

On seeing Centrino embodied in the 450XL, the first thought in my head should have been, “What a fine mobile platform.” It is indeed that. Instead I thought, “This would make a great server.” I imagine Pentium-M in a virtualized blade or farm configuration, scaling itself to use only the minimum energy required for each task.

A desktop or small server ought to scale itself to its working environment and application requirements. It ought to heed an administrator’s orders to work as quietly as possible when it has officemates. A machine should quiet itself when its microphone picks up conversation. When it senses its surroundings are warm, it should consult a user preference that tells it whether to rev up its fans or slow down the CPU to generate less heat so nearby humans and other machines will be more comfortable.

I recall seeing something like this only once: A setting on an IBM ThinkPad that let me choose between performance and quiet. That would be a good place for any machine to start.