Go green!

To think about our environment is good, we have been taught this since childhood, because in a sense we are responsible for the actions of our ancestors. It is a pity that growing up, we begin to forget about it.

Intel is seriously concerned about energy consumption and energy efficiency: new factories are built using environmentally friendly materials, renewable energy sources are used, processed, filtered, sorted and everything possible is done to keep our (only) planet clean. But besides this - we help each developer build energy-saving applications for mobile platforms based on Intel processors - this applies primarily to the Atom and Core line.

Why is it important? I think that there are several answers to this question and everyone can choose the one that suits them. But for a start - a small preface.

Historically, with an increase in the power of Intel processors, their power consumption decreased. Each transistor in the latest Intel processor development uses 1/7000 share of the energy that was required by earlier models. For comparison, if car manufacturers achieved the same results, today's cars could drive about 50,000 km. on 1 liter of fuel.
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It seems to me that all of us here are quite reasonable people to understand that recharging a laptop or tablet is not only a plus for electricity, but ultimately carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, in the process of generating this same electricity at the station .



So why not try to create applications that allow you to more efficiently use battery power, thus reducing the number of mobile device connections on the network? After all, all the prerequisites for this have already been created and without knowing how to create applications that intelligently use the power of the CPU, RAM, hard disk or optical drive, we find ourselves in a situation where, in a loincloth and with a club, we enter into an ultra-modern building of steel and glass. Funny Still would. However, applications created by such craftsmen are still the majority.

Creating energy-saving products is akin to teaching a person how to sort garbage: plastic, glass, and paper and cardboard. It is tiring, but over time, a person gets used to it, the process itself becomes a habit and you can no longer see any difference between throwing everything in a common box, or distributing it in different ways. Although, as we know, there is a difference.

Now ask yourself a simple question: do you optimize your application so that it uses the power of the battery in a laptop or tablet as efficiently as possible, and simply reduces the power consumption of your PC? Unfortunately, practice shows that a very small percentage of products are built with such requirements in mind, and developers treat it as a “third grade” parameter or do not take it into account at all. Although, as it seems to us, this should be an integral part of the development of any software.

Here's a real-life example: if I watch a DVD movie on my laptop, which is better for a multimedia application: use a large amount of buffer and make fewer drive motions or keep it spinning all the time? This is a little extra work for the developer, but the strategy of buffering will add about 20 minutes of life on the battery, without recharging. By the way, playing in high resolution (whether BlueRay or HD-DVD) is even more gluttonous - good luck watching something longer than a one-hour documentary on a standard laptop battery. Therefore, the developers of such applications should pay even more attention to how they consume the energy of the batteries of those devices for which software is released.

Why don't manufacturers simply make more capacious and more efficient batteries? They do - every year increasing their efficiency by a little bit more. Perhaps someday, fuel cell batteries, which we have all been waiting for several years, will take their place. Ironically, they will be banned in airplanes - the place where we most often notice how limited the work of mobile devices is. CPU manufacturers just do not stand still and make corrections to the architecture of processors, and other hardware, aimed at improving energy efficiency. By causing all PC components to “speak” in the same power consumption language (ACPI), we made a big leap forward in this direction.



For years, manufacturers of mobile platforms have spent tremendous efforts to increase the volume and density of used batteries. Technologies are constantly improving, processors have new power saving modes, and displays have progressed for several generations in terms of power consumption. But there is always room for improvement, and software can play a critical role in how long a mobile device will last without recharging.

Playing DVDs is just one example. There are several technologies that can be applied to reduce the power consumption of an application. They are conveniently divided into three areas: computational efficiency, information efficiency, and context knowledge .

Efficiency of computations is that any procedure should be completed quickly in order to send the CPU to rest and save energy: use fast algorithms, multi-trading and advanced technologies like SSE4 .

The effectiveness of the information will make you think already about how the application reads and writes data (this is not about the disk, but about the drive) and how the information moves in the process of performing a function. Playing a DVD is such an example.

Knowledge of the context indicates that the application “knows” about the current battery level and power profile, acting in accordance with and responding to changes.

Is “green software” that is developed with these parameters better sold? We are sure of it. You can directly tell your customer or customer that you care about how long his laptop will last without recharging. In the end, it will reduce its electricity bill, and at the end of the entire chain of electricity generation, the level of emissions of harmful substances into the atmosphere will also decrease.

What can you personally do to start working in this direction? You can start with a simple: read the rules for creating energy-efficient software , which is a list of recommendations to developers from Intel. After acquaintance with it, if you really want to take the right step and start with yourself, check your own development by the criteria for evaluating energy-saving software - this will allow you to understand whether you are fully using modern technologies in order to save battery power of a mobile device.

And finally, if you seriously decided to introduce methods to optimize the use of energy in the development - we have a special development for you called Intel Power Checker . This software will generate for you a report on how effectively all the rules for developing energy-efficient applications in your product have been observed - you only need to download it on the website in order to get personalized statistics. By uploading your report, we will upgrade your status to an Intel partner, so you will have access to various program resources.

Visit the Intel Software Assessment Center to learn more about how you can make your development energy-saving and make happy product consumers who know that the battery of their laptops and tablets doesn’t face a discharge in 30 minutes of work with your application.