Yesterday General Motors Corporation made a big announcement: it's shutting down four production facilities across North America which produce some of its trucks and SUVs over the next few years. GM is also "undertaking a strategic review of the Hummer brand to determine its fit within the GM portfolio".
The reasoning is obvious: consumers can no longer afford to drive gas-guzzling vehicles. This announcement is just the next step in our conversion to a green economy. Where might the next steps come from?
A recent report from CHOICE, an Australian consumers group, reported recently that the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles and plasma screen TVs use more electricity than many big appliances, such as refrigerators. The "next" generation of consoles will have to keep this in mind as energy costs will continue to rise. There are two ways that I can see this happening. The first would be to make a console on the same horsepower level as the Wii, which ranked low in the CHOICE report. The second would be to greatly improve the efficiency of all the chips and their usage during use and standby mode. Which path is chosen depends largely on whether Sony and Microsoft consider their consoles "successes" when compared to the Wii.
With airlines now charging for extra luggage on flights, jet fuel prices nearly doubling since last year alone, and a recent story on American Public Media's Marketplace suggesting that one plane trip to Hawaii (calculated in fuel used per person) uses more fuel as the average driver uses in a year, I think the airline industry is due for a refit. But public transit or railways obviously cannot reach places like Hawaii. I don't see any alternatives in the near future, barring some breakthrough in teleportation technology, as hydrogen powered planes are in their infancy and airships/blimps are relegated to Super Bowl duty. I would love to see new development in either of these technologies, if not for the sheer romantic value of propeller aircraft and massive floating airships.
There are lots of other industries that will have to change soon to cope with our new world. Send any stories you may find to me and I'll write about the interesting ones :)
The reasoning is obvious: consumers can no longer afford to drive gas-guzzling vehicles. This announcement is just the next step in our conversion to a green economy. Where might the next steps come from?
A recent report from CHOICE, an Australian consumers group, reported recently that the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles and plasma screen TVs use more electricity than many big appliances, such as refrigerators. The "next" generation of consoles will have to keep this in mind as energy costs will continue to rise. There are two ways that I can see this happening. The first would be to make a console on the same horsepower level as the Wii, which ranked low in the CHOICE report. The second would be to greatly improve the efficiency of all the chips and their usage during use and standby mode. Which path is chosen depends largely on whether Sony and Microsoft consider their consoles "successes" when compared to the Wii.
With airlines now charging for extra luggage on flights, jet fuel prices nearly doubling since last year alone, and a recent story on American Public Media's Marketplace suggesting that one plane trip to Hawaii (calculated in fuel used per person) uses more fuel as the average driver uses in a year, I think the airline industry is due for a refit. But public transit or railways obviously cannot reach places like Hawaii. I don't see any alternatives in the near future, barring some breakthrough in teleportation technology, as hydrogen powered planes are in their infancy and airships/blimps are relegated to Super Bowl duty. I would love to see new development in either of these technologies, if not for the sheer romantic value of propeller aircraft and massive floating airships.
There are lots of other industries that will have to change soon to cope with our new world. Send any stories you may find to me and I'll write about the interesting ones :)
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2 comments:
The real problem with game consoles is the heat dissipated. I read in the IEEE spectrum that uprocessors dissipate over 90% of the power the consume in heat. One of the solutions is faster/more CMOS chips. CMOS chips use mosfets instead of BJTs which only consume power when switching, but are always slower to switch than BJTs.
also look at this picowatt processor (its for sensors)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/15/2055229&from=rss
That's probably the technical reason for the difference in performance and power usage. I'd be interested to see how the Wii uses those transistors versus the PS3 or 360
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