Allocation, allocation, allocation. If the machines become self-aware, they’ll have no problem leeching all the power they need from the grid, no matter how much they require.As James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services observed recently at a Google-hosted data-center-efficiency summit, there is no Moore’s Law for power — while servers become progressively more powerful (and cheaper to deploy) and software boosts server productivity, the cost of energy (as well as water, needed for cooling) stays constant or rises.
More evidence for my argument against the Singularity. There’s a lot more interesting info in the full article.
Not to mention, there are spacial improvements to be made. From the article:
The huge power draws have spurred innovation in the form factor of the data center itself. For its Chicago center, Microsoft is outfitting half the building with shipping containers packed with servers. “Imagine a data center that’s about 30 megawatts, with standard industry average density numbers you can probably fit 25,000 to 30,000 servers in a facility like that,” says Microsoft’s Chrapaty. “You can do 10 times that in a container-based facility, because the containers offer power density numbers that are very hard to realize in a standard rack-mount environment.”
