Climate-change concerns, the cost of energy, and new regulations continue to prompt energy-efficiency initiatives across the IT sector. The rise in energy consumption has brought the efficiency of today’s IT devices and technologies to the attention of investors because of the operating costs they represent. In addition, regulators worldwide are increasingly addressing energy efficiency in consumer electronics equipment. As the world’s largest supplier of networking equipment, Cisco has established a comprehensive program to assess energy efficiency across our entire product range.

 

Assessing Product Energy Use

Network equipment can be divided into core, edge, and end devices. Examples of end devices are digital video recorders, IP phones, and broadband access routers. While individual end devices do not use as much power as the energy-intensive devices located at the core of the network or at service provider sites, they offer the greatest opportunity for saving energy because they are sold in higher volume. The technology and services that Cisco delivers can have a significant impact on the operation and energy consumption of these devices. Cisco’s greatest opportunity for improving network energy efficiency is to lower the demand for power in end devices while they are not in use.

Our multilevel approach to addressing product energy efficiency ranges from components, systems, and software to optimizing the energy used by the network as a whole. Key Cisco product energy-efficiency initiatives during FY08 are shown below.

 

Component Architecture and Hardware

Efficiency begins with the smallest product components, namely integrated circuits, or chips. Cisco’s R&D and supply chain teams look to include sustainability in chip design criteria and have been able to make significant progress in enhancing the performance of each new chip generation.

We use a chip design approach called Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Optimization to regulate the function of an ASIC so it performs a specific task at faster switching speeds. Voltage Scaling regulates the power needed to perform a targeted task. Cisco engineers also employ a technique called clock gating, which powers down portions of the chip circuitry that are not actively being used for computing.

 

System and Software Design

The judicious use of power-down and standby modes offers additional opportunity for energy-efficiency gains, as illustrated in the diagram below.

For many of Cisco’s mission-critical routers, implementing these measures is challenging due to the requirement that they operate on-demand, around the clock. But significant power savings are possible for peripheral devices, such as those that receive their power over network cables (called Power over Ethernet, or PoE), and consumer electronics, such as our set-top boxes. The graph below shows a 17-percent decrease in the energy demand of set-top boxes over the past four years.

Energy-efficiency measures that Cisco uses in our end devices include:

• Spinning down hardware on devices when not in use
• Powering down areas of a chip that are not in use
• Minimizing the frequency of communications between devices

Besides working to improve energy efficiency, Cisco is collaborating with industry groups to develop specific metrics that can be used to benchmark the performance of a variety of products.

 

Progress and Future Plans

During FY08, Cisco conducted a full assessment of our products’ energy requirements, determined which products have the greatest impact, and created programs to improve energy efficiency across our product lines. Activities planned for FY09 include:

• Work with our industry partners to agree on power configurations
• Assign each product a Power Profile Specification
• Establish energy-efficiency metrics for benchmarking the performance of our equipment
• Set performance improvement targets