'Sleep talking' PCs save energy and money
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http://www.physorg.com/news159787471.html
"Personal computers may soon save large amounts of energy by "sleep talking." Computer scientists at UC San Diego and Microsoft Research have created a plug-and-play hardware prototype for personal computers that induces a new energy saving state known as "sleep talking." Normally PCs can be in either awake mode—where they consume power even if they are not being used, or in a low power sleep mode—where they save substantial power but are essentially inactive and unresponsive to network traffic. The new sleep talking state provides much of the energy savings of sleep mode and some of the network-and-Internet-connected convenience of awake mode.The computer scientists named their system Somniloquy, which means "the act or habit of talking in one's sleep." In fact, the system allows a PC to appear to "say" to other hosts on the network, "I'm awake and I can perform non-power-intensive tasks"—even though the PC is in sleep mode. If more computational muscle or resources present on the PC such as stored files are required, Somniloquy wakes up the PC.
The goal of Somniloquy is to encourage people to put their PCs in sleep mode more often, for example when they are not being used for computationally demanding tasks. "Reducing energy consumed by wall-powered devices, especially computing equipment, offers a huge opportunity to save money and reduce greenhouse gasses," said Agarwal."
