This past August, a group of developers associated with the Mambo open source content management system decided to fork the project and start Joomla!, citing too much corporate control over Mambo by the Australian company that founded and funded it, Miro International. Since then, misinformation has spread like a wildfire around the Internet, and many Mambo users are left wondering what really happened and if they should switch to Joomla. If you find yourself confused by the whole Mambo/Joomla! fiasco, this article’s for you.

Ed. note: while the official project name is Joomla!, in the interest of readability we’ll be referring to the Joomla! project without the exclamation mark throughout this article.

A brief timeline of events

The story begins where, publicly, it left off: with the Brian Connolly attack on Mambo, its corporate sponsor Miro International, and individual developers and participants therein. It may have only been the battle du jour for Connolly, but many of the people involved with Mambo felt that the project needed more protection against similar attacks in the future. Miro had been providing that protection up until then, using its own resources.

Corporate sponsorship of an open source project is by no means new or unheard of. Sun Microsystems opened the source code to StarOffice years ago, creating the OpenOffice.org project from it. It was the largest donation of source code to the open source software community in history, and its approximately 10 million lines of code comprise the largest open source program in the world — larger even than the Linux kernel. The vast majority of the active developers working on the project work for Sun. There’s also the popular Eclipse development environment, which was originally developed and then open-sourced by IBM, but is now controlled by the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. And who can forget that Red Hat sponsors the free software Fedora Core operating system?

After Connolly’s attacks ceased, Robert Castley, who was responsible for the original resurgence of Mambo, suddenly stepped down as the project’s lead developer, and Mambo contributor Andrew Eddie took over. According to several Joomla developers, the collecting of ad revenue from the Mambo sites that Miro hosted seems to be the chief bone of contention that started trouble between the Mambo core team and Miro International.

Some of the Mambo core developers had an idea for a non-profit Mambo Foundation to hold and control Mambo, and Andrew Eddie presented it to Miro CEO Peter Lamont over the phone. Although at first reluctant to give up Mambo, Lamont says that he came to think of it as a good idea after some consideration. Before long, the issue of who would hold the copyrights to the Mambo code came up. Ultimately it turned into a dispute, and caused the project to fork. Lamont told me, “I had invested many hundreds of thousands of dollars in Mambo over the years and a decision to assign the IP was not something I consider lightly. I also felt the [Mambo] foundation was not necessary as we had funded Mambo and taken a back seat for many years and that everyone seemed perfectly happy with the way it was.” But both Peter Lamont and the Mambo core team believed that changes did need to take place in the way Mambo was managed. “We all agreed that Mambo should embrace a larger audience which included commerce. For Mambo to be taken seriously in the commercial world (and this goes for all open source software), I believe it needs three things in addition to being a good product: demonstrable management; training and certification; and support. These were the things Miro could help with.”

Although unrelated to the restructuring of Mambo’s management, Miro had plans to develop training materials to use in courses and certification programs for clients. Since the Mambo core developers seemed privately incensed over Miro’s advertising money, were they also upset that Miro would be charging for Mambo training and certification? If so, were they upset enough to fork the project and start their own Miro-like business to provide training and certification? Several members of the Joomla core team comprise an LLC called JamboWorks. Mitch Pirtle, who is involved with both JamboWorks and Open Source Matters (OSM), a non-profit that protects Joomla, told me in an interview that there was no affiliation between JamboWorks and OSM. There is, however, the following statement on the front page of the JamboWorks Web site: “Joomla! is a project built on hundreds of thousands of hours given up for free for the benefit of others. Because of this, JamboWorks is commited [sic] to supporting the Joomla! project.” How committed are they? The JamboWorks Web site says that a training program for Joomla will be launched in January 2006, and other services — like custom template creation and migration from other CMSes — are also offered or announced.

Regarding Mambo-related revenue, Peter Lamont told me: “Advertising was the fastest way to generate income to hire the staff and servers we needed to get all the sites running the way we all wanted. The training and certification was a really early idea that never got off the ground and I didn’t have any ideas about revenue at any point, nor was it ever brought up.”

Starting in December of 2004, a Mambo Steering Committee was established with representatives from both Miro and the Mambo development team. This committee was designed to govern the Mambo project. At the request of the developers, Miro went forward with planning and implementing a non-profit Mambo Foundation some months later, using the Eclipse and GNOME Foundations as organizational models. This is where the trouble begins. According to Peter Lamont, the Mambo Steering Committee representatives that were selected to participate in the formation of the foundation suddenly demanded that the copyrights to the Mambo code be assigned to the Mambo Foundation.

The misunderstanding over this reassignment of copyrights was twofold: Lamont thought of this demand as the first step in a coup d’etat by rogue Mambo developers who wanted to hoard the software for their own commercial purposes. The developers thought that Miro was trying to retain control over the code so that it could dictate who could and could not offer official Mambo training and certification. Neither party appears to have fully understood that the code copyrights fell under the control and jurisdiction of the GNU General Public License, which prevents anyone from “taking” code away from the copyright holders, and corporations from restricting others from offering services. If the license already prevented what both parties feared from each other, was this simply a well-masked fight over money?

Upon learning of JamboWorks and the developers’ seemingly nefarious plans, Lamont immediately modified the terms of the proposal to start the Mambo Foundation, fearing that the open source project that he had fostered for five years would be hijacked by rogue developers. The developers, in turn, saw this as a corporate hijacking of the software that they had worked hard on. Both the Mambo developers and Peter Lamont felt that they “owned” Mambo and, from different points of view, both were correct. Both parties felt that they were being cheated by the other side, communication — if it had been at all open and honest up until that point — broke down, assumptions were made, and flame wars started on various Mambo-related forums around the Internet. Egos and personalities on both sides of the disagreement prevented either from backing down. And finally, not long after the Mambo Foundation was solidified by Miro, the Mambo core team forked the project into Joomla.

According to Andrew Eddie and Mitch Pirtle, the chief problem with Miro’s actions during this period was the limitation of Mambo developers on the Mambo Foundation board. Originally there were to be two Mambo representatives, two Miro representatives, and one uninvolved third party — a lawyer who specializes in copyright law. Lamont had specific problems with Mambo developer Brian Teeman, whom he forbade from joining the Mambo Foundation board because of his allegedly undesirable behavior. Lamont didn’t trust Eddie or Teeman, or their friends; he had seen evidence that suggested they were planning to wrest control of the project for their own commercial purposes. The position forcibly vacated by Teeman was offered to Robert Castley. Initially he agreed to the position, but backed out shortly thereafter. Two sources told me that it was pressure from people within the Mambo community — possibly members of the core team — that drove Castley off the board. The resultant imbalance of power on the Mambo Foundation board was among the last events that took place before Mambo was forked.

The electronic soap opera

Both Peter Lamont and the developers who later defected to Open Source Matters had one thing in common: they spent much time on Mambo forums discussing matters which were best left to private discussion. In speaking with the Joomla developers, I heard much about what was said, censored, or deleted from online forums, and little about what happened offline “in real life.” At one point Mitch Pirtle offered me this post as an example of continuing hostility from the Mambo camp toward the Joomla developers. He later admitted that it wasn’t as hostile as he thought, but still insisted that the use of the word “resumed” in this announcement was antagonistic.

Pirtle also said that he was upset at Lamont’s post to the Mambo message forum about the establishment of the Mambo Foundation. Allegedly the post was made public before any of the Mambo core team members were notified privately. Peter Lamont disagrees with Mitch Pirtle’s memory: “I was extremely careful to do the right thing and email people directly first to mitigate any unnecessary unrest. I didn’t make any such post on the forum and I certainly would never have done it in advance. That’s not my style.”

Everyone involved seemed to want to make a public statement that would sway the community and get them to attack the opposing party, eventually losing sight of what was at stake and concentrating more on having the last word in the message forum than resolving the dispute. Andrew Eddie told me that he was reluctant to comment on the circumstances leading up to the fork because there was so much pain involved, and in an interview, associated the situation with a messy divorce. For a moment, it’s easy to forget that he’s talking about software. Did Eddie and his Joomla colleagues foolishly stake their emotional well-being on the politics surrounding a software program, or did something else go on behind the scenes that would more reasonably justify such an emotional reaction? Anonymous sources told me of quiet threats made to third-party Mambo developers, demanding that they switch their development efforts to Joomla. These people were too scared to go on record for this article, afraid of retaliation from their aggressors, and afraid that their Mambo-based businesses would be ruined. Were these anonymous people telling the truth, or just adding fuel to the fire? If they aren’t lying, who threatened them? We outsiders may never know; the Open Source Matters people I contacted who participated in the Mambo/Joomla debacle staunchly refuse to discuss any of these matters, claiming that they have been advised by legal counsel to remain close-mouthed. What do they hide that the people who use their software are forbidden to know?

Rumors

To counter much of the misinformation around the Internet, I conducted interviews with several members of the Joomla project; the Mambo Foundation; and Miro International. Despite what you may have read elsewhere, the following rumors are false:

• Mambo changed its name to Joomla. Although this fallacy was initially reported, the Mambo project did not change its name. The old core team forked the project into Joomla, but Mambo remains intact with a new core development team. The Mambo trademark belongs to the Mambo Foundation.
• Miro did not honor Peter Lamont’s promise to assign the Mambo copyrights and trademarks to the Mambo Foundation. The Mambo trademark and copyrights belong to the Mambo Foundation as of December 21, 2005. According to the parties involved in the transfer, it took a great deal of time and monetary expense for the paperwork to be approved.
• Miro tried to make third-party Mambo developers pay a fee to continue developing modules and components for Mambo. According to Peter Lamont, there were never any such plans discussed or implemented. There was, however, a level of membership available in the Mambo Foundation to third-party developers who wanted to have a say in the direction of the Mambo project. Similar membership options are available in the Eclipse Foundation, which was the inspiration for the Mambo Foundation. Foundation membership is not required to develop Mambo or Mambo-related software.
• All of the third-party developers have abandoned Mambo. A few who have close ties to the Joomla project have given up developing for the Mambo platform. Fortunately for Mambo users, the open source projects that have been committed entirely to Joomla have been forked and adopted by developers in the Mambo community. The only major component that has been switched to Joomla is the Two Shoes Module Factory’s SimpleBoard forum software. Mambo developers have forked the project and now develop it as MamboBoard. The following projects have also been either adopted by Mambo developers or will soon be superseded by core modules: mosCE, Zoom, AKOComment, and MambelFish.
• Mambo doesn’t have any developers left. While the former Mambo core team did defect en masse to Joomla, they were quickly replaced. The new Mambo core developers are already familiar with the code and working on — in the words of lead developer Martin Brampton — radically improving it. “We are reviewing and planning from the ground up, but aiming to avoid any nasty shocks for our community,” Brampton said in an email.
• Miro controls the Mambo Foundation. The Mambo Foundation board has five positions. Two are filled by Miro International, and two are filled by representatives from the Mambo Steering Committee. The Mambo Foundation is a non-profit organization run exclusively by its membership. All board seats — including the ones held by Miro employees or officers — will be up for election by the membership in June of 2006. It is indeed possible for all Miro-related people to be voted off of the board at that time, if that is the wish of the foundation membership. Secondly, Miro has turned over control of the Mambo-Foundation and MamboLove Web sites to the Mambo Foundation. Thirdly, Mambo Steering Committee members receive all email concerning the operations of the foundation, and control the day-to-day operations and the project roadmap. Neither the Mambo Steering Committee nor any of the new Mambo core developers have any affiliations with Miro.

Mambo and Joomla now

As of this writing, Mambo 4.5.3 and Joomla 1.05 are reportedly compatible in terms of database structure, templates, modules, components, and mambots, although various minor problems are starting to pop up here and there, if requests for help on discussion forums are any indication.

This period of interoperability may end up being brief. According to Mitch Pirtle, the two projects are headed for a major divergence. Drastic modifications will be made to Joomla to accommodate better internationalization support, and a new content structure is planned which will completely discard the section/category organization traditionally employed by Mambo. These changes, when implemented, are certain to break compatibility with most or all Mambo-designed modules, components, and mambots.

Martin Brampton agreed that interoperability would eventually fade away, but that the Mambo developers would not accelerate that process intentionally. “We think that in many cases, where there are desirable changes [to the code], they can be made with minimum disruption to interfaces. Where interfaces have to be changed, we are not dogmatic about specific choices, provided they reflect sound design principles,” he said.

The following table gives a quick, superficial comparison between the two projects on a few key points:

Andrew Eddie and Mitch Pirtle gave me some information about the next major version of Joomla:

• Structural changes to the APIs that employ better object-oriented programming principles, and will allow for better PHP5 support in a future version.
• Better internationalization support through the implementation of UTF-8 and separate language modules.
• Expanded database support (Oracle and PostgreSQL) and cross-database functionality.
• An FTP installation mode.
• Improved caching.

The Mambo core team also offered some information about the future of their project. The following reflects the major points that have been decided on as of this writing, but is by no means an exhaustive list of improvements and new features:

• Longer release cycles, with changes being applied via more frequent patches. This is by user request, to keep releases viable for longer periods of time while making security updates and bug fixes easier to implement.
• A code overhaul which will improve speed and resource efficiency. Hooks for mambots will be added, and object-oriented interfaces will be provided and documented for third-party developers. Use of global variables will be eliminated.
• Internationalization support for the client, admin, and content sides.
• Support for PostgreSQL and major commercial databases. The new features of PHP5 and MySQL5 will be fully exploited in the next major version of Mambo.
• Separation of core components, making way for third-party developers to offer commercial replacements for things such as banners, contacts, and content.

Looking at the major overhauls that both core teams plan to make, it’s reasonable to assume that a Mambo fork may have been necessary for technological reasons, above and beyond any political problems.

Conclusions

It was neither the developers nor the traditional caretakers of the Mambo project that suffered most from the public spat that caused Mambo to fork; it was the users, who remain confused as to what to do with their Mambo installations and future sites that need content management systems. We may never know everything that happened, even if some of the details may reveal problems with the future of either project.

If you’re using Mambo currently, do you need to switch to Joomla? The answer is no, as far as my research for this article shows. Having tried to switch two sites from Mambo to Joomla, I can personally attest to the fact that there very well could be difficulties in the transition, especially as they relate to the register_globals PHP setting. A small number of modules will have to change; the only one I found for certain was SimpleBoard, which has to be switched over to JoomlaBoard or MamboBoard to stay with current development.

Both Mambo and Joomla have the same major goals in mind, but will end up taking different paths to get there. Only time will tell if Mambo’s fork will outshine it — or if it will even succeed after its initial momentum is exhausted. As for Mambo itself, I was shown evidence in the form of download numbers and Web site traffic statistics that indicate that Mambo has not only been unharmed by Joomla, but has actually become more popular since the fork occurred. The post-Joomla success makes one wonder what Mambo really lost — if anything — from the core team exodus.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.

Measuring power use and cost

Electricity consumption is generally measured in kilowatt hours (KWh). A kilowatt is a thousand watts, and that’s more electricity than any single device in your home will consume at once. You won’t know how much power each device consumes unless you measure it (although refrigerators often have stickers that list their rate of power consumption). So how do you do that?

Although you can use a multimeter to measure power usage, I’ve found that specialized meters are a better solution. If you think that you’re spending far too much on power consumption in your home, the price of the meter is negligible. Though there are a few different meters that specifically measure electricity consumption, I’ve found the Watts Up Pro to be the most cost-effective.

Next, you need to know what your cost per kilowatt hour is. You can check your utility bill to find out for sure, but for the purpose of this article, I’m going to use the average cost per KWh for my home state of Florida: $0.0731 (a little more than seven cents per KWh). That’s about the middle of the energy cost spectrum in America. You can look up your state’s average cost per KWh as of the year 2002 at this site, which uses data from the US Department of Energy.

Rigor calefactare

Obviously, refusing to give power to a device means that it will not cost you any money to operate. But you have a computer so that you can use it, not so that you can marvel at how much money you’re saving by not using it. You could turn it on only when you need it, but that puts a lot of thermal stress on a machine.

Thermal stress is among the top causes of failure of electronic and electromechanical devices. It’s not just heating something up or making it cold that causes damage or a shortened lifespan — although these stimuli in extremes can be fatal to electronic devices — it’s thermal stress, or the rapid transition from one thermal state to another. In other words, turning a device on and off — a power cycle. Turn something on and off enough times and eventually it will fail to start.

Most people are already familiar with this concept as it relates to automobiles. We all know that city miles are harder on a car (and on fuel efficiency) than highway miles. In other words, when the car is frequently starting and stopping, it undergoes more stress and uses more fuel. When it is running at a consistent temperature and pace, it becomes more efficient and has a longer life. The same idea applies to all mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical devices.

Your hard drive is the most important internal component of your computer. If it fails, you lose all of your software and data, rendering the computer useless in a home desktop setting (networked computers can use remote storage instead of a hard drive, but that requires a great deal of know-how and at least one other working, networked computer). It’s also the part of your system that will probably fail first because of its reliance on electric motors. The drive platters have to spin at speeds as high as 10,000 rotations per minute, and the motor that controls the read/write heads has to skim over the surfaces of the platters with exact precision. This is a recipe for failure because of the high amount of friction, but currently it’s the only way to quickly, cheaply, and reliably store large amounts of data in a computer system.

So do you save money by turning the system off when you’re done with it, or do you leave it on all the time to maximize the life of the machine? The answer depends on how much money you’re spending on electricity for the computer, and how often you use it. If the computer is very important to you and you use it often, it’s probably a good idea to leave it on most of the time. On the other hand, if your energy bill is unacceptable, you might have to sacrifice the computer’s longevity for short-term financial stability.

If you’re looking to save some money on your energy bill and are ready to buy a new computer or new computer parts, what choices will yield the best energy savings? I measured a variety of scenarios over a period of fifteen minutes, starting from five seconds after the power switch was activated (this delay avoids recording the huge power spike that a computer experiences when it is initially powered on). I recorded the watt hours consumed in that timespan, the average monthly kilowatt hour (KWh) usage, the minimum and maximum wattage, calculated the cost based on the above-mentioned cost per KWh, and organized the data into the following comparisons:

Dual Opteron or Dual G5?

It’s the original personal computer argument: Apple or Intel/AMD? I hardly think that power consumption will sway any Apple enthusiast’s opinion, but for the sake of measurement, let’s see which system is hungrier.

The first system is an Apple PowerMac with two G5 processors at 2.0GHz, 5.5GB RAM, two 250GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives, a wireless network card, an ATI Radeon 9800 video card, and a 20″ LCD screen. The operating system is OS X 10.4.3. The second system is a Sun Java Workstation w2100z with two AMD Opteron 252 processors, 4GB RAM, a 72GB 10000RPM SCSI-360 and a 180GB 7200RPM SATA drive, an Nvidia Quadro FX3000 video card, and a separately powered (not measured for this comparison) Samsung SyncMaster 997DF 19″ CRT display. The operating system is Gentoo Linux for AMD64.

It’s hard to find two machines that can compare “fairly,” and I have no doubt that the “losing” side of this comparison will scream and cry about fairness no matter what machines are chosen. The only major point of difference that I could see was the LCD monitor on the Mac, which is powered through the data cable. The tests below show that a 17″ Apple LCD adds about 8.8Wh to the numbers, so a 20″ will draw somewhat more. Anyway, here are the results:

Dual G5 or Dual G4?

Now that you know how much power a high-end Dual PowerMac G5 uses, let’s compare it with its predecessor. The system in question is an Apple PowerMac with two 800MHz G4 processors, the stock DVD writer and 80GB hard drive, 384MB RAM in two modules, an Nvidia GeForce2 video card, and a 17″ LCD monitor (powered through the data cable, no USB devices attached).

Pentium D or Athlon 64 X2?

Word around the Internet is, Intel’s processors draw a lot more power than their AMD equivalents. I don’t know if the Pentium D 820 is equivalent in performance to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ because I did not measure speed, but they are of the same technological generation and fairly close in price, so as far as I’m concerned they are close enough to compare power consumption.

Each system used an Antec TrueBlue 480 power supply; 1GB of either DDR2-533 or DDR400 RAM in two modules; one Seagate SATA-V 180GB hard drive; a Matrox G550 1X PCIe video card; and a Lite-On 52X CDRW/DVD-ROM drive. The Intel machine was based on an Asus P5WD2 motherboard, and the AMD machine used an Asus A8N-E.

The real challenge was finding an operating system that worked on both machines. Well, actually the challenge was getting anything to work properly with both motherboards and the video card. Windows XP had problems, nearly every GNU/Linux distro had problems, and the *BSDs didn’t have drivers that fully supported the graphics card. I ended up settling on Knoppix version 3.9 for x86. It’s not the best choice for accurately measuring power usage because it runs from a CD, and that means that the CDRW drive will suck in some extra power. In other words, the numbers are inflated by roughly 5Wh.

Clearly the Intel machine draws a lot more power than the AMD machine, and they are using as identical a hardware configuration as possible. The Intel machine could cost you more than $36 more per year to run (or more, if your cost per KWh is more than 7.31 cents). Multiply that times an office or school full of machines and you’ve got a lot of wasted money flowing through your power strips.

Also note that the Apple G5 machine above draws almost two and a half times as much power as the Athlon 64 X2. Of course the numbers are a little skewed for a direct comparison between the two machines, because you’d have to load up the X2 with a lot more RAM, another hard drive, a more powerful video card, and add in a 20″ LCD monitor. But compare it to the G4 PowerMac, which has one hard drive, a lot less RAM, and a more comparable video card. It uses more than 50% more electricity than the Athlon 64 X2 (and slightly more than the power-hogging Pentium D) and is considerably weaker in terms of computing power. Minor variables aside, the difference is striking, especially considering the hardware costs involved.

LCD or CRT?

Using the aforementioned Sun Java Workstation, I measured the power used by a Samsung SyncMaster 997DF (among the better 19″ CRTs on the market), and with the G4 PowerMac I tested an Apple 17″ LCD that was purchased with it. The Apple screen gets its power through the DVI connector, so the power measurement was a little more difficult than usual — I had to measure the power with the LCD disconnected and then subtract that from the whole system’s readings.

Secondly, the CRT’s power readings fluctuated wildly. When there is a lot of white on the screen, the CRT uses considerably more power than when the screen is mostly black. In a blank, hardware-accelerated GNU/Linux virtual terminal, the power usage was around 50W. Switching into GNOME with a typical light-colored theme made it jump more than 50% — up to about 77W. The LCD monitor used pretty much the same amount of power no matter what the screen was showing, so it had a more consistent reading.

So that big CRT on your desk is costing you more than twice as much to operate as a comparable LCD screen would. A few years ago that cost difference did not justify the increased cost of good LCDs, but LCD prices have come down considerably over the past two years.

Linux or Windows?

I tested five OSes on the same Pentium D-based machine: Windows XP Professional, SUSE Linux 10/x86, OpenBSD 3.8/AMD64, Mandriva Linux 2006 PowerPack Edition for AMD64/EM64T, and the same numbers I recorded before with Knoppix 3.9 for x86. Where applicable, all of them were installed with default options and immediately updated with the latest patches and service packs at the time of testing. Once the system was updated and rebooted, I used it normally until the fifteen minute test period was over; usually this involved playing solitaire, browsing the Web, and in OpenBSD’s case, downloading the Vim package and typing part of a short story into a text file. This ensured that no power-saving functions would kick in, and it also portrayed a more accurate power draw on the system than just letting it sit idle. While the non-standard test procedure leaves room for variance, I found only a difference of less than 1Wh between test iterations.

Not much difference between Windows XP and GNU/Linux, except for the min/max fluctuations. Initial readings for Mandriva showed much higher numbers, so I contacted some programmers at Mandriva and they suggested that the problem may be with an ACPI module, or the Kat search tool may be indexing in the background. I believe it was the latter; I reinstalled the whole OS from scratch, applied all patches, let the system stay on all night, then rebooted and tested. The numbers from that test are the ones you see above. What this may mean is that increased or sustained hard drive activity can significantly affect power usage, even when there is only one hard drive in the system.

OpenBSD almost falls within the margin of error. Since the video card wasn’t doing much, I assume that this was the cause of the lower power usage. Maybe operating systems don’t mean much when it comes to power consumption.

Everything the light touches

So just how much power is my whole workbench sucking down? This test combines the Sun Java Workstation w2100z, Samsung SyncMaster 997DF monitor, Altec-Lansing ATP3 speakers, and a Logitech MX1000 laser mouse.

There were significant fluctuations depending on what the computer was doing. Once I reached the text mode login prompt, the average meter reading was around 317 watts. When I started X.org and loaded GNOME 2.10, that number shot up to over 340. Then I started Unreal Tournament 2004 and watched the meter go over 400 watts. I played the game for about three minutes, then quit and did normal desktop work — email, Web, writing, etc. until the test period was up.

Conclusions

If you buy computer parts and peripherals with power consumption savings in mind, you can make a significant difference in your energy bill. By choosing an LCD over a CRT monitor, an AMD-based machine rather than an Intel or Apple computer, or a dual-core machine over a dual-processor machine, you can lower your electricity costs while not necessarily reducing computing performance. And if money’s really tight, you may want to think about switching to GNU/Linux or *BSD and working mostly from the command line. I doubt many people would take that route just to save a few dollars on electricity on a desktop computer, but consider the implications for laptop systems. How much battery life does your notebook computer have? Working from the command line could greatly increase the length of time you can use your system away from a wall socket. Anyone who has had a layover at New York’s JFK airport and searched for the hidden power outlet (no, I will not tell you where it is) knows the value of maximizing laptop battery life.

What about servers and workstations? Cost savings aside, in places like California where there are regional limits on how much power a business can consume based on the size of the building, an IT manager must consider power usage when building a server farm. Instead of big, power-hungry Intel Xeon machines, a company could increase the number of servers it can operate by choosing a more efficient dual-core Athlon 64 X2-based configuration. Or in offices that require a large number of workstation or desktop machines, abandoning Apple in favor of drastically more efficient AMD64/EM64T-based computers could make a big difference.

I mentioned above that the difference between AMD and Intel in the test scenario meant an extra $36 per year for Intel machines. That’s per computer, so if you have a school in Florida with two 30-machine labs, that adds up to $2160 of extra electricity per year, just by choosing AMD over Intel. Instead of upgrading to G5s, switching from PowerMac G4 dual-CPU machines to more powerful Athlon 64 X2-based computers could mean a savings of $2325 over the course of a year, based on the data above. That doesn’t count the extra savings beyond the higher cost of operating a G5.

If you’re gung-ho about saving money on electricity now that you’ve read this article, remember that every power cycle brings your electronic devices closer to death. There’s no way to “win,” really — one way or the other you’re spending money. The question is how much and how often.

Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.