• http://racy.com racy_rick

    This PC isn’t such great news as the EU’s powersave regulation. This truly proves that regulation in the marketplace provides growth of innovation. I hate the cry from big business that says regulation will always impede business. Case in point: Minneapolis and. St. Paul were openly dumping raw untreated sewage into the Mississippi until 1974 and until then not because the companies had a change of heart, but because our laws compelled them to stop.

  • CE=Comunism Endures

    Its not about saving power its about banning imports.
    Saving 1 watt per person is stupid.  Having a $6 tax for every watt generated so that solar power could be built to generate the 1 watt would be a much more reasonable approach.But then when has the EU ever been reasonable?

  • Ed H

    My big question is: How is it possible to have a computer that is “asleep” that draws truly zero Watts?  The only way for a modern computer to truly achieve zero watts is to completely cut all mains power.  This is because of the requirement of 5 V standby power, which, among other things, is required to power the on/off circuitry.  Are we going back to the AT days, of a physical power switch?  I just can’t think of any other way of having a system draw literally zero mains power.
    Unless by ‘zero’, they mean ‘less than one’.

  • George

    in answer to Ed H, the modificationss could be something as simple as including low level SSD to save memory state, and a BIOS level interaction to perform the equivalent of a laptops ‘suspend to disk’ function. -In the case of the Macbook Pro, the deeper sleep state includes saving enough memory state that you *can* survive complete powerloss and battery removal.
    The additional save requirements would be register level device settings, USB state, and other external device shutoff, which since ACPI is now better defined for most non-legacy devices. Disk controllers and the like need to be told to save state, because their fine-point runtime configuration is semi-soft: its on-device as well as in-memory, and so a device level interaction is sometimes needed. USB chains need to be re-established in order: they have addresses on the serial bus too, you don’t want USB chains re-numbering.
    if the definition has been done properly, I can well believe its a true zero-volt draw. It would be easy to test: unplug the device, wait 30sec, and then reattach the power (the capacitance on the power supply could be enough to survive less than that: my IBM laptops external switching powersupply appeared to keep power for at least 3 sec beyond being cut off the wallplug)

  • Felix

    Ed H: I can imagine a couple of ways to operate a “soft” power switch that don’t require constant power:
    - have a capacitor store just enough power to kick-start a physical switch in the power supply. pressing the soft on button on the front flips the switch. (it would probably lose its charge after a while; if it does you can still reach behind the computer and press a real button.)
    - make the front power switch a mini-generator / linear motor — the physical movement of pushing the button in generates a tiny current, enough to kick-start a switch to mains power.

  • John

    To be truly zero-watt I dare say Fujitsu has put in a battery someplace to provide the low amount of power needed to wake the system up again when needed…  The battery is charged when the system is running and off when the computer is switched OFF completely…

  • Richard

    I’d do it with a relay in the power supply and somethign with enough juice to monitor for whatever input it needs to and fire the relay when you bring it out of sleep mode.
    IF the stored power runs out then a physical button across the relay contacts could provide power after which the relay would latch on until the machine is switched off again.

  • hwertz

         *ding ding ding* We have a winner!  I read about someone (I assume Fujitsu…) working on this for monitors about 6 months or a year ago.  The VGA power saving uses a 0 volt signal for “off” and 5 volts otherwise.  Conventional designs use wall power to monitor this pin and turn the monitor back on.  Well, Fujitsu realized, why not charge a capacitor and turn off a relay.  It uses a passive (non-power-consuming) analog circuit to watch the signal line.. the 5V power itself is enough to trigger this circuit to dump the cap into the relay, turning it on.  Back then the cap would stay charged for about 2 weeks.. after that you had to use the power button.
         Computer?  As George says, just make sure suspend-to-disk works.  Or shut it off.  Most computers now use a 5V “standby” but it should be easy enough to just make a board and power supply that don’t use it… The tricky bit, though, Fujitsu says you can “manage” the machine via LAN, bluetooth, or UMTS… surely you can’t do wake-on-LAN via those?  I would think monitoring the LAN etc. would take power. 

  • Rob Hagopian

    Perhaps WOL is driven by the power from the ethernet switch/hub. It’s not PoE but there might be enough.