Examples include Cool'N'Quiet technology AMD adapted from its notebook chips. Cool'N'Quiet instructions baked into AMD's desktop processors throttle down chip power when the processor is idle or executing simple tasks. As a result, the processor runs cooler and requires less fan speed, said Jonathan Seckler, senior product manager for AMD.
"The goal is we would be able to reduce the noise as much as 10 or 15 percent and reduce the actual power usage as much as 60 percent," he said. "In a lot of cases, that means you're reducing the decibel rating to below 25dB," the same level as rustling leaves or someone whispering and close to the level of ambient noise in a quiet home.
The shift toward quiet is something of a turnaround for AMD, which helped spark the move to noisy, high-speed cooling fans in 1999 with the original heat-spewing Athlon chips. Seckler said the market has changed since then to put a value on aesthetic concerns such as sound.
"You no longer have this race where it's power and performance at all costs," he said. "We've seen there is a price you pay for performance. At the end of the day, noise and heat do matter."
That's a message underdog chipmaker Via Technologies has been pushing for years. Most of the Taiwan company's PC processors and motherboards are low-power models designed to run without a cooling fan, an advantage that has helped Via chips find their way into an increasing number of media-centric PCs. Werner du Plessis, project manager for processor platforms at Via, said it's about time the PC industry looked at issues beyond processor speed.
"Our message has always been cool and quiet processing," he said. "We've never participated in the megahertz race, and finally people are waking up [to the fact] that we had it right from the beginning."
Via is well-positioned to grab a major chunk of the market for media PCs, du Plessis said, because it's easier to build a quiet system around a chip designed for fanless cooling than to retrofit mainstream chips.
"Having a processor designed to run cool and quiet... is something you have to aim for," he said. "It doesn't happen naturally."
Which is why Via and other quiet-computing proponents don't expect the mainstream PC industry to adopt a "silence is golden" ethos anytime soon.
Hush Technologies' Booth said consumers who want a truly quiet PC will have to continue to seek out specialists.
"Everything we've seen so far and into the foreseeable future," he said, "is that the mainstream PC companies are going in the opposite direction from us."
