Its not easy being green
It's not easy ...
Recently, NVIDIA won a place in IBM’s datacenter workhorses. Previously, IBM had collaborated with others to produce the Cell processor, aimed at providing a scalable high performance and low power computing solution.
It’s not enough to be green; you have to be cheap, easy to program and orders of magnitude better at crunching data.
This observation is important. In the rush to be green, you can’t violate the laws of physics or the free market. Innovations need to stand on their merits, or they will only succede with unsustaniable subsidies. Policy and lifestyle switches that don’t deliver a better quality of life will not stand the test of time.
There are pleanty of examples of green technology that have survived this gauntlet. Interface carpets completely reinvented their enviromnetal impact and emerged more profitable and popular because of it. IKEA reduced their fuel consumption and packaging and have reaped large profits from reducing overhead.
The cell processor was a good idea. But without the full package, just being low power didn’t cut it.
Source – GigaOm – Nvidia Shows Off Its Survival Skills With IBM Win
Rob Knoth
