Computers and heat density

Recent posts on the subject of "modern" logic families and PCB's make me think of an obvious trend in computing over the past several decades: Power density (and required cooling/heat dissipation) have grown greatly. A desktop PC of 20 years ago often had no fan, or if it had one it was just to generally keep air moving through the case and not to cool any specific heat producing sections. Of course modern desktop PC's (since at least the early/mid 90's) have vastly greater heat production and cooling requirements, with CPU heat sinks and fans being vital to reliability. At the same time, and a subject of increasing frustration for me, the number of computers required to do a given task has gone up exponentially. Tasks that used to (meaning 20 or 30 years ago) used to require a single PDP-8 or PDP-11 class minicomputer now use dozens to hundreds of PC-clone's to do the same functions. The heat production (and power and cooling requirements) of all the resulting PC-clones is hugely higher. In fact through the recent heat wave, computer/server usage is mentioned as a sizable component of total power consumption on the grid, when presumably 20 or 30 years ago it was negligible. I personally see massive government/military contractor computer projects turn into a race to buy the fastest/biggest/best/most computers with little regard as to whether you need hundreds of blade servers to run a single web site or mail server. It is also frustrating to see Peoplesoft/Oracle/Microsoft sell thousands and thousands of licenses at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars when the same function used to be done by a single PDP-11 with a couple of RK05's! Yet nobody seems to be asking: WHY DOES IT TAKE 100 COMPUTERS TO DO WHAT A SINGLE COMPUTER USED TO DO? After all, computers today are hundreds of times more powerful (CPU-wise) than they used to be. Disk storage is vastly more compact power efficient than it used to be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure everyone should have the same appreciation that those of us reading this message for "that computer of 30 years ago is good enough for what I do". Yet I would expect that any real demand for actual computer utility would make some sort of progress other than "buy ten thousand seats of Oracle licenses and several hundred oracle servers just to serve the needs of a single municipal city government HR and payroll". Some random articles about building sites where the required power/ cooling density is either explicitly addressed or in retorspect they didn't have enough: NSA risking electrical overload (Baltimore Sun): http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.nsapower06aug06,0,51374… Google's Server Farm with massive cooling towers: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/17/BUGA3JUO7M1.DTL OK, diatribe mode off. I'm going back to my 6SN7's and 807's playing some old 78's I got at the thrift store yesterday. Tim.