In today’s world of pollution and climate degradation as a result of the emission of power, coal. And greenhouse gasses, it is of utmost necessity that the essences of looking after minutely basic ways to save energy are imbibed. One such thing that has been on a boost in terms of use is personal computers and laptops. We cannot at all deny their multiple-facet use in this time of monotony where every other person is seen working from home. While the global leaders pledge to cut down the greenhouse emissions and wastage of energy to huge percent, the individual responsibility of making a change on our part cannot be ignored.
When it comes to how computers waste energy, most consumption stems from personal habits. This is especially true when it comes to miscellaneous electrical load. Miscellaneous electrical load is a phenomenon that occurs when devices and electronics around the home burn unnecessary wattage, causing our energy bill to rise. Home computers are subject to miscellaneous electrical load because they are often plugged in for extended amounts of time. Here’s a few easy-to-do things we can adapt to while cutting down the wastage of electricity and power.
Sleep Mode & Power Management Features
Use the built-in sleep mode and other power management features that come with your computer. These helps reduce the amount of consumption your computer uses over the long-term. For instance, change settings so the computer automatically goes into sleep mode when activity is not detected. Power management features can be applied to the monitor, the hard drive, and the entire operating system.
Smarter Monitor Use
When trying to reduce personal computing energy, also consider how the monitor is used. For instance, the brightest setting on the monitor uses about twice as much energy as the dimmest setting. Therefore, get into the practice of turning down the brightness settings of monitors when they are in use.
Power Devices Down
Turn off computers and their monitors if they are not being used. The same holds true for accessories like printers. Leaving equipment running while they are not in use causes them to produce heat and use energy. Shutting them down will help equipment run cooler and keep your energy bill down.
Computational Efficiency:
The goal of computational efficiency is to complete a task as fast as possible. CPU can accomplish the task in fewer instructions or by doing work in parallel in multiple cores, thus dropping the CPU to a low-power state, which then means that the overall energy required to complete the task will be lower. One approach to achieve this will be to write the best algorithm and data structure for the particular problem.
Idle Efficiency:
Idle Power for mobile platforms is defined as the power consumed when the system is running in ACPI S0 state (S3-Sleep or S4-Hibernate) with software applications & services running but not actively executing workloads. In this state, there should be minimal background activity. The challenge is to lower the idle floor by improving application idle efficiency which will lead to a significant increase in battery life. This also benefits average power scenarios and helps all but the most demanding (TDP-like) workloads.
- B) Data Efficiency
Data efficiency reduces energy costs by minimizing data movement and can be achieved by designing:
1) Software algorithms that minimize data movement
2) Memory hierarchies that keep data close to processing elements
3) Application software that efficiently uses cache Memories
This, thus delivers performance benefits and saves energy.
Conclusion–
It is the need of the hour to realize how extremely easy and small actions can make high contributions, thus helping save the climate from a major drop of sanity. While we all work out ways out, trying to fit into the new world of technology, imbibing these basic ideas and putting them to use can go a long way for humanity and climate protection.
