Samsung’s Aggressive Green Tech Strategy

SAN FRANCISCO – With an ever-growing number of American consumers getting on the energy efficiency bandwagon, Korean electronics giant Samsung is giving them plenty of ways to go green, from TVs to datacenters.

Samsung makes everything from memory to flat screen TVs to refrigerators, so it covers a pretty wide swath of electronics products. As such, it gives the company a large scale opportunity to make an impact.

Samsung has been making this pitch for a while. Kicking off an event here in the city on its “Go Green” efforts was David Steel, senior vice president, who noted a survey that found 39 percent of consumers say individual Americans should take the lead on environmental issues.

“That means people believe it’s no longer about someone else taking responsibility for them, but more and more about individuals taking responsibility for themselves,” he told the luncheon crowd of analysts and journalists.

A second survey found 52 percent would pay more for green products. Just how much they would pay depended on location. As many as 22 percent of people in that same survey said they would pay a 20 percent premium for green products, with Seattle residents the most green-conscious, willing to pay as much as 30 percent more for green products.

However, there is a downside: going green has to have immediate payback, noted Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung. When the economy tanked in the fourth quarter of 2008, sales of CFL light bulbs plunged for the first time ever. The twisty bulbs are popular for their low power draw, but it take a long time for the savings to be realized because they cost quite a bit more than traditional filament-based light bulbs.

The drive to solid state drives in the datacenter

Samsung is making power savings a priority across the board, and noted that in many areas, its product offerings are already 100 percent Energy Star compliant. Just in the past year, Samsung has cut the power draw on its LCD TVs from 185 watts to 100 watts. Its real push, though, is in memory and storage.

Elliott discussed efforts to shift from hard disk storage and DDR2 to solid state drives and DDR3 memory, and made bold projections on the impact on datacenters. “Everything we do on the semiconductor side will influence things downstream. So products must perform,” he told the crowd.

Elliott talked at length about replacing the high-speed 15,000 RPM drives used in datacenters with SSD drives, an idea that has been discussed but not really implemented because SSD isn’t proven in the market yet.

He said Samsung and other vendors are continuing their efforts to improve reliability and long-term viability of SSDs in datacenters, but said it will take time.

Next page: Bioplastic phones and other consumer breakthroughs

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DDR3 memory could offer a 50 percent or more savings over DDR2, which is used in AMD Opteron-based servers. Intel Xeon servers, however, use the even more power-hungry FBDIMM, which is a considerable power hog. Elliott did not get into a comparison of DDR3 vs. FBDIMM.

Elliott said that 32GB of DDR2 memory could use up to 90 watts of power, but 48GB of DDR3 could get as low as 20 watts, and those benefits scale as you deploy more memory. “So the bigger the footprint, the more power you will save by converting to DDR3,” he said.

At the beginning of his talk, Elliott note that datacenters now account for about three percent of the total power consumption in the U.S. In theory, he felt that datacenters could reduce their draw to 2.25 percent total with a conversion to SSD and DDR3.

Ambitious? Definitely. But he noted that if all servers met the new Energy Star label for servers just released in June, it would save $800 million per year in power consumption.

Adaptive luminance and bioplastic phones

Samsung also discussed other programs that don’t have a direct IT correlation but still can have impact. Scott Birnbaum, vice president of sales for the LCD division, discussed efforts to move to LED backlights for notebook panels. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has led the way on this with its MacBook displays.

By switching to LED and using local dimming, reducing power to the screen in areas that are already dark, Samsung things monitor power draws can be reduced from five watts to just two watts. The process of cutting power to a darkened portion of the monitor is called adaptive luminance and is still under development, he added.

Justin Denison, vice president of strategy and market intelligence for Samsung Telecommunications of America, introduced the Samsung Reclaim, a mobile phone made of 80 percent recyclable materials. Its body is made from bioplastic, which is derived from corn, and the charger is Energy Star compliant.

Another effort is S.T.A.R., Samsung Takeback And Recycle, a program to recycle laser printer toner cartridges. So far, Samsung has worked with private carriers, like UPS, and took back 80 tons of cartridges. Now it has partnered with the Post Office, so you can just drop off toner cartridges at a local office or give it to your postman. This program only applies to Samsung printers.

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