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AMD 90nm Evaluated
muyuubyou writes "The Tech Report has measured the new 90nm A64 3500+ against its 130nm counterpart and a Pentium 4 3.6Ghz 90nm.
AMD looks way ahead in the 90nm process especially when it comes to power consumption.
Note these are consumptions for the entire system including GeForce 6800 GTs and hefty PSUs. RTFineShortArticle for more detail on the configuration.
Leaving the PC on overnight is probably not a good idea with these new Pentium 4s."
Buy an Intel Prescott based system if you live in the Artic Circle ...
Looking at the data in the article, would I be mad in assuming that a 90nm 3500+ uses around 23W in idle mode?
Assuming power supply is 75% efficient:
112W * 0.75 = 84W getting to system
179W * 0.75 = 134W (130nm under load, near TDP of 89W, let's assume 84W)
134W - 84W = 58W Mobo, Gfx, IDE, etc power consumption
84W - 58W = 26W
26W * 0.9 (motherboard VRM efficiency) = 23W
I suppose that system power usage also drops in idle mode though as well.
Yes, these figures are extremely dodgy and vague and aren't worth much more than the speculation they are. It looks like the 3.4GHz P4 uses over 100W under load though - that is shockingly high.
Well, in my book, power consumption is not a huge issue if there is proper cooling. Under normal and even high use conditions, the unit is designed to take the heat, and my server room needs a bit more heat anyway. Why shouldn't I leave it on? My units have good cooling, and since I run my boxes under normal server configuration, i'M not "overclocking".... Heat? No issue.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yes, actually it is.
Let's say your average 'gamer' system uses 500W of power, including monitor.
At 10c per KWh, that is going to be 5c/hour, or $37/month.
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I'd wait until the Athlon 64 PCIe boards come out before buying a new system, so as to prolong useful system life. Nvidia's nForce4 chipset should be out in 4th quarter or thereabouts. _Then_ you can jump safely into a new system.
And remember that most modern operating systems (Windows 2000/XP, Linux) run a single "HALT" instruction in their idle thread. All CPUs since the Pentium Pro (1995) automatically enter their low-power (200 mWatt or so) idle mode in response to a HALT. As long as you're not running Seti@- or Folding@Home in the background, your CPU isn't going to be wasting power unless you are DOING something.
Cool'n'Quiet, baby.
say the P4 uses pretty grossly 100 watts more than the AMD - and you leave that on for 10 hours overnight each day for a year. say you pay about 7 cents a kilowatt-hour. then you end up paying .10 kilowatts * 10 hrs/day * 365 days/yr * 7 cents/kilowatt = ~ 25 bucks a year extra to run the P4. :)
say there are 100,000 P4 users doing this - there goes 2.5 million USD worth of electricity up in heat!
I believe we're still at 16c/kwh in southern California.
So, that's eight cents an hour.
Now let's say you and your wife each have one. Fuck, that's nuts. And the reality is that I use three PCs by myself. Our house has six. There's no way we can upgrade to something like this.
Most people have gas heating. Gas heating is far, far cheaper than horrible, ineffecient electric heating.
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>How fast can the 90 nm Athlon 64 core go before it dies?
At least 3.6GHz. That's a 130nm(? I assume) Athlon FX-53, so the 90nms will do better.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
A friend of mine, an overclocking expert (inventor of the "Goldfinger devices" if anyone remembers those) said that the new shrunk cores overclock to around 3GHz if you can get your FSB high enough (though this won't be an issue with the FX chips, which aren't clock-locked).
To those paying attention, 2.2GHz in an Athlon64 can generally outperform a 3.4GHz PentiumIV, so this is a big deal.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
AMD have 35W mobile processors at up to 2GHz now based on the Athlon 64.
And leaving your PC on overnight does make a difference. Lets say you leave it on all the time, but only use it 8 hours a day. Intel P4:
16 hours * 150W (idle, 230W if folding) * 7 * 52 = 870kW (1.3MW) of power consumed more than you need to use.
Now I don't know about your electricity prices, but 15c/unit is $130 a year to run the system without any use ($200 when folding). If you have an overnight cheap electricity rate though it won't be nearly as bad.
As was already posted, AMD has Cool'n'Quiet on the desktop which runs chips at 1GHz using reduced voltage @ 22W.
1 10858.html
Intel is planning something similar for the Prescott before eventually getting the P-M to the desktop now that Tejas has been canned.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040602
"The new capabilities Intel plans to include are the so-called AAC technology that adjusts performance depending on load in order to maintain low heat dissipation and quiet operation of personal computers"
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
In fact the spike in power use from turning a system on in the morning is often higher then the amount of power it will draw all night while doing nothing.
That is complete bullshit.
Let's say your PC spikes to 500 watts for an entire minute before settling down to 50 watts. This would represent a worst case senario.
In this case, your couputer would use as much power in 10 minutes as it did powering up. Show me a modern PC, laptops included, that idle at less than 50 watts. Low end centrinos idle in the low 60s.
the relative difference between the 90nm processors (defined as the difference divided by the average) in power consumptions is huge, and pretty consistent: 30% at idle, and then 43%, 45% and 44% for the other tests. These are huge numbers !
That's being pretty generous -- The power supply of that 'average gamer system' would have to be running at peak capacity 100% of the time to use that kind of power.
A large screen CRT monitor uses somewhere around 50-70W when active, and 1-2W in sleep mode. LCD displays use less power, but they're not what the average gamer uses.
Steady state usage for the computer itself is more like 200W than 500 -- The 500W capacity on your average gamer's power supply is equal parts peak capacity for boot-up and lies told by marketing, and you would have to be playing Doom 3 all day long, every day to keep that up for the entire month. Even if you disabled power management and just let it idle all night long it would still use less than 100W.
Using these numbers, and assuming that your average gamer is playing twelve hours a day and in class or sleeping the other twelve, we're looking at an average power consumption of 175W for a total of fourty-two cents per day or $13 a month at your rates.
The back of the envelope rests, your honour.
My entire "cluster" consumes less than 600W (554 "idle" -- 575 gaming.) That's 1 x dual Opteron 240, 1 x dual PIII 850, 1 x dual PII 333 (dual Voodoo2 in the thing), 7 x 146G FC drives in a Eurologic FC7 shelf, cable modem, Cisco 1760, Sony LCD monitor, unmanaged ethernet switch, etc. That comes to, on average, 352$ per year. [~30$/month]
I spend more per year using the kitchen toaster than all of the computer hardware combined.
Just because you have a 500W power supply in the PC does not mean it consumes 500W.
151W (idle) * 12 hours * 360 days * 15c/unit = $100 a year extra on your electricity bill BEFORE you factor in the power used in your A/C to remove that heat.
If you are nice and do Folding or SETI or RC72 or whatever it is now, then you're looking at $150 at least.
If you are in an office, you can see how the costs could rapidly ramp up!
Sorry dude,
TV: 25" color 150 watts
TV: 19" color 70 watts
TV: 12" B&W 20 watts
The analogy is more like falling asleep with an industrial halogen flood light on and a big subwoofer amp playing drum and bass on 11.
Every night.
You fucking slob.
"I'm breaking a sweat at 72F"
Time to check your weight and/or blood pressure.
You start by building a 50 to 100 foot tower on top of your home so that the turbine will be high enough to be in wind flow without blockage from nearby obstacles (i.e., trees and other houses).
Research all about windpower here http://www.windpower.org/en/core.htm as it seems to me to be the bible of wind power.
Then, integrate the power that the turbine generates into your homes power grid. This is a good resource: http://www.homepower.com/
An article that caught my eye in Popular Science pointed to these folks http://windausenergy.com/ who are making a vertical turbine, a technology which has been around for quite some time but they say that with recent break thrus in material it actually makes it practical to use.
Ok, I have a P4 3Ghz, ATI Radeon 9800, 3 HDD's (which do not sleep) and a 21" CRT monitor. The only power saving feature I use is putting the CRT into sleep mode after 15 minutes. Otherwise the computer and drives run full time.
My electricy bill is at times lower that $30 a month. No, I do not use the spread your payments out option.
Apple free since 1990!
"Low end centrinos idle in the low 60's".
... as reported by /proc/acpi. (acpi doesn't totally work in my Athlon 64 laptop, but from relative battery life I imagine it pulls around 30-32.)
That's incorrect, from my experience.
My mother's Athlon XP-M laptop idles around 25 watts. This is the complete power draw, counting the disks, LCD (on dim), and everything
Also, let's do some math. Its battery has a capacity of 4.4 amp-hours, and can get about 3 hours on a charge while idling.
The battery puts out 14.1 volts, so its total capacity should be 62.04 watt-hours. Thus, to idle for three hours, the computer has to use about 21 watts.
Now, this is a monster laptop: large disk, 15 inch widescreen, and a non-Centrino processor. The battery, natch, is pretty big as well. I think the whole thing clocks in at a little under eight pounds.
My friends' small iBooks get ~5 hours to a charge, and I bet they have lower-capacity batteries than the big M5312. They have, of course, smaller LCD's and efficient G4 processors. I wouldn't be surprised if they draw 10-15 watts.
My laptop (HP nx5000) seems to idle at about 9 watts when on battery and conserving power, about 15-17 without any power saving. Not very sure about what it uses when connected to the grid, but seems to draw somewhere about 40W when charging.
/proc/acpi, from the battery voltage and discharge rate. Voltage is about 12V, discharge rate is usually about 850 mA when conserving power.
I calculated this from the data in
My PowerBook G4 1.5GHz is drawing 19 W while I'm typing this. The external Samsung 19" LCD takes another 20 W. Of course, the second screen is optional. I'd expect a Centrino to be in about the same energy consumption range. Your point is still valid though, if you change your 10-minute figure to 25.
Sorry but you are not correct. The 19" Flat Screens do about 100-140W. My Sony G400 19" does about 140W and <1 W in standby.
Samsung Syncmaster 957 MB 19" CRT: 110 W
ViewSonic E90 19" CRT: 100 W
Benq Professional P992 19" CRT: 110W
Electric power generation and distribution isn't very efficient. For every joule of electrical energy delivered to your outlet, two or three joules of heat energy are dumped from the power station's cooling towers and smokestacks or lost in the transmission lines.
A good gas furnace can be around 90% efficient. The relative costs of heating by both methods reflect this in most areas.
(Electric heat pumps can be competitive because they transfer a couple of joules of heat for every joule of electricity that they consume. However, a computer is not a heat pump.)
Actually, for CRTs, active power usage depends on the rate of the dot clock.
The power usage of a monitor will increase linearly with dot clock (with some minimum accounting for the brightness of the display).
Most high-end 19" monitors (with high-speed dot-clocks) have a maximum power usage of around 140w. Those numbers you have quoted are for THE HIGHEST supported resolution and refresh rate, with the maximum brightness...they vary because the maximum brightness and maximum dot clock speed vary among them.
On the other hand, most people use the recommended resolution and brightness set by the manufacturer. That is usually 1280x1024@85Hz on a 19" monitor, for a dot clock of around 111MHz.
For comparison, if you run your 19" monitor at 1600x1200@85Hz, you'll see a clock of 163MHz, and a proportionate increase in power usage.
For example, my monitor (Vision Master Pro 454) has a maximum rated output of 135w. If we ignore the brightness issue, then we assume that at maximum frequency (1920x1440@85), or 235MHz, the power usage is 135w.
So, scale down to a more reasonable resolution like 1600x1200, and we're only using ~ 93w. Or use the recommended resolution at 1280x1024, and we're sipping a cool ~ 63w.
Of course, these numbers are probably a bit higher due to components I have not taken into account. I do recall that the instruction booklet for my 454 lists power usage at multiple resolutions, and they did display this linear relationship, but I don't have access to it now.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Low end centrinos idle in the low 60s. (watts)
No, Centrinos (just the Pentium M chip) run full-out at 7 to 25 watts:
Intel Centrino, AMD Athlon XP-M Spark Lightweight Laptop Blitz
The biggest thing you can do for your electric bill is get rid of your incandescent bulbs, compared to that, nothing else comes close. Replacing a 60 watter with a 20 watt CF will net you 40 watts each, and you get about 1.5x the brightness.
your average house has something like 10 replaceable bulbs, so that's something like 400 watts, more than even a couple large computers.
I was able to get my router (a PC with several NICs, running Linux) down to 35W idle and near silence by using a passive-cooled 700MHz VIA C3 CPU. The old router was a 27W 160MHz 486, but that one just couldn't quite manage fast-ethernet speed forwarding between the two LANs.
19" CRT monitors are about 80-150W depending on whether the picture is mostly black or mostly white. 17" LCDs are about 40W active, doesn't matter what's on the screen. A monitor in "sleep" mode is 1-5W. An ATX PC in "soft-off" (S5 sleep) takes about 4W.
I use a pass-through watt meter to measure this stuff.
All CPUs from the same process/family are identical other than miniscule speed and thermal characteriistics.... It's because the company simply marks down the CPU to a lower rating.
Yes, they have the same maskset etc. Heck, different speed grades come off of the same wafer. However...these "miniscule speed and thermal characteristics" quickly add up when you have the number of transistors on a CPU, and QA knows what areas of the wafer are better than others, and bin the die accordingly. Believe me, AMD wants as high an ASP as they can manage, they will not mark down die simply to supply the low end.
The type of characteristics you're talking aboout are the small differences between any two, even identically rated, CPUs.
No, the types of differences I am talking about are the forefront of the device and integration engineers workday. They work their behinds off for incremental gains in Idsat. When a wafer comes out with a particularly "hot" chip on it, that lot is analyzed to death to figure out "what went so right."
So, what I have said that is untrue? TR took a chip known to perform better (according to AMD, and they should know) to compare against a slower speed grade, known to AMD to be not as fast. Why is this not an apples to oranges comparison? We are talking about only a ~20% difference.