[CS-FSLUG] Quantify the Power Savings (was: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection)

[Greg Slade]

I was reading my usual trade rags today, complete with the Microsoft 
propagand^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hads claiming that Windows has a total cost of 
ownership than Linux. (It still boggles my mind that nobody has sued M$ 
over that little bit of book-cookery.) There was also much discussion 
over power usage in data centres. According to one article, 38% of all 
power consumed in the US is burned up in data centres (both in powering 
the servers, and in cooling them), with all the associated costs to 
businesses and the environment. Taking those two together, it wonders me 
if anybody has ever done a study quantifying the electricity savings with 
using Linux vs. Windows. After all, we all know that Windows is bloated, 
and wastes far too many clock cycles in OS overhead. What I'd like to see 
is some lab results showing, say, useful (as opposed to theoretical) 
MFLOPS using the same hardware running Linux vs. Windows to perform the 
same tasks. I'd expect it to show that running Linux allows you to get 
more work done on the same hardware for the same amount of power used, 
but has anybody actually run the tests to put hard numbers on the 
difference?

Greg


Greg Slade    grga at bluebottle.com    http://associate.com/camsoc/greg/
"Ultimately, you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the
means represent the seed and the end represents the tree."
                                             - Martin Luther King, Jr.