For as long as there has been a computer technology media, there have been predictions as to where it will be headed in the near and distant future. At first, predictions were really soft because the rest of the electronics industry moved at a slower pace. Today, computer technology drives electronic innovation, so we have bigger ideas for the future of computing -- more automation, more processing power, more appealing interfaces, and more complexity. What few people ever include in that bundle of dreams is "more power consumption." I never imagined that I would own a computer that would suck down more than 400 watts under normal operating conditions. Recently I got a power supply in for review that offers a steady power delivery of nine hundred watts. That's more than my refrigerator! Fortunately, a few hardware companies are heading in the opposite direction, inventing computer parts that use as little electricity as possible.
It's weird to have a 400w behemoth on one side of me, and a little, compact 8w desktop machine on the other. Oddly, both of them perform all of the usual desktop tasks with equal speed. Both work with small-to-medium documents with ease. I use the same email and Web applications on both systems, but one of them uses fifty times more electricity. For that gigantic increase in resource consumption, I'm enabled to do higher-powered things like play 3D games, run a dozen or more programs at once, and encode large video and audio files substantially faster. But is it worth an increase in cost of operation by a factor of 50? Well, in my case, this being my primary workstation where I do almost everything for work and play, I would say that it is. But if I ran an office with 10 or more systems, I don't see how I could turn down the opportunity to pay 50 times less for each desktop machine, assuming the little VIA processor and flash memory card can handle the workload.
Every time I see a new high-end computer product that uses (or provides) substantially more electricity, I think that this will be the peak -- all other products from now on are going to use the same or less power and deliver the same or better performance. That's not what happens in most instances, though -- the battle for higher power consumption rages on as people add two or four power-sucking video cards to PCI Express systems to get slightly better frame rates at higher resolutions on larger monitors, create RAID arrays of 10,000RPM hard drives to see an equally small gain in performance, and then add all manner of fans to cool the space heater they have created in a PC chassis. Truly this is an era of computing decadence.
I think I prefer the other end of the spectrum, where higher efficiency trumps incremental performance gains. I've always enjoyed working with VIA's Mini-ITX formfactor motherboards. They're no less expensive than higher-powered machines (more expensive in some scenarios) to buy and build, but less expensive to run. The small formfactor also opens up a huge well of creativity for designing various kinds of appliance computers and chassis designs. Lately I've been playing with the Zonbu, which is the 8w machine I mentioned earlier. The whole machine is brilliantly designed, both from a hardware and a software standpoint. It is undoubtedly a glimpse of the near future. In the distant future, I expect PC technology to merge back into one path that combines low electricity consumption with a high degree of computing power. In the meantime, you'll have to pick only one.
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