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AMD 'Venice' Core Shows Big Drop in Power Needs
dtjohnson writes "
Lost Circuits has carefully
measured the power consumption of four recent Athlon 64 cores and
has found that power consumption has been dramatically reduced in the
new 'Venice'
core from the relatively-low (compared
to Intel P4) numbers of the original 2003 'Clawhammer' core to less
than 30 watts under load and less than 10 watts for Windows at
idle. This huge power reduction was apparently accomplished by a
combination of 90 nm die shrink, Silicon-on-Insulator
technology, and something called 'dual-stress
liner technology' As Lost Circuits points out, power
consumption worldwide has been exploding as more CPUs come online and
the CPU power requirements increase so a significant power reduction
will reduce the burden on electrical grids everywhere."
Now, these numbers were completely extrapolated from the key cracking rates I saw generated on my Athlon 1200, and estimates based on published power consumption. But it pointed out to me that these distributed contests are not good for us, and they're not free. It personally cost me about $40.00 / year in electricity. So, I don't play the distributed computing games any more.
John
What about the heat. You can make snide remarks about Intel all you like but, the last I saw, they were a fair bit cooler than the AMD's that would burn up in seconds, literally.
Power density is one of the biggest reasons why you don't see massive colocation facilites. Unless they themselevs are colocated with a power plant. :)
The mirror of the article is here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Excellent!
This is quite a welcome change from the days of the old AMD chips that would tan you as you worked.
Looks like its time for Intel to spend a bit more time looking at power consumption.
hooray for competition!
Starsucks
"a combination of 90 nm die shrink"
No, the Winchester core preceding it was 90nm. There was no die shrink with Venice.
Still a great core, but this is a blatant error on the front page.
Great, now my transmeta stock is going to go negative.
That really is a big drop THat's what they should put in those computers for third-world countries >.>
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I wonder how many cars of coal have been used to read /. ? While every watt counts, I could do much better replacing my light bulbs with lower wattage. In California it's like installing a low flush toilet and save 1000 gallons a month when the central valley uses 80% of the water for watering crops.
I would be a little paranoid if I had a 'Venice' core and was using water cooling, what with the rising water and all...
to less than 30 watts under load and less than 10 watts for Windows
Ta*dit*boom!
Remember kids, it doesn't take much effort to break Windows, so be careful.
it pays for itself? :)
... shouldn't it also reduce the heat produced by processors, therefore extending processor life?
:)
Or, for an overclocked machine, extending the amount of time it takes for the processor to die?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
While I was cracking with d.net, the heat generated by the PCs involved was simply replacing the heat that would have been generated by my home heater anyway. It's an even exchange and 100% efficient. That is, all of the engery expended in crunching the keys ended up heating my house.
A completely different argument is that any advance costs. So, we learn about RCx, distributed processing pros and cons, some d.net politics, etc. If you expect to gain this knowledge for no cost you are simply being naive.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
...don't use any less water, since you have to flush them 5 times to get the crap down the hole.
The old ones at least worked the first time around, even after a big meal.
Man those intel chips are so hot that they perform nuclear fusion on the die that generates enough energy to satisfy their mindblowing power requirements
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
Lowering the power consumption per core is a first step to upping the number of cores. I imagine that CPU power consumption for desktops will level out in the 100 W range and makers will add cores, cache, and clock speed to maximize performance within a given power budget. I could also see some innovators creating new cooling technologies to boost the power budget and thus boost the permissible CPU performance within that expanded budget.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
they always score a 5 funny and I could use the karma.
Too bad the "funny" moderation doesn't give you any karma, exactly to prevent what you want to do.
"As Lost Circuits points out, power consumption worldwide has been exploding as more CPUs come online and the CPU power requirements increase so a significant power reduction will reduce the burden on electrical grids everywhere."
Erm? As more cpus? Or cpus with stupidly high power usage.
Someone once told me that 7/10ths of the world doesn't have a phone line, let alone a computer. Now your telling me that the power usage of the world has increased due to all these people getting computers? I seriously doubt it.
How about all these people are finally getting electric to their houses? They finally have eletric kettles, ovens, irons, microwaves...
Im not saying that a lower usage cpu wouldn't make a difference, but im saying its going to make a very small difference compared to somethings.
Plus its going to be a LONG while before we see any difference. The only chips really to take the pi££ when looking at powerusage are the top end P4s, not like teh A64s etc are as bad as these?
As newer low powerchips are already out i doubt the p4's are going to make much of a impact either way.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
While it doesn't really make that much of a difference, the core lines gon Diego (1MB L2) andV enice (512kB L2).
Clawhammer(754)->Clawhammer(939)->nothing->Sa
Newcastle(754)->Newcastle(939)->Winchester->
But whatever. I'm sure the extra cache doesn't make too much of a difference.
Do they still let users overclock their cpu's? I know intel locked thier CPU's. I wonder if AMD still lets people play with their products more.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Windows XP 64bit is written for Itanium and AMD's x86-64. Intel wanted to do their own version of x86-64 and Microsoft told them to get stuffed.
You're the one living in a world 10 years out of date.
This is a pretty good decrease in consumption, but according to http://computer.howstuffworks.com/monitor10.htm "CRTs are somewhat power-hungry, at about 110 watts for a typical display, especially when compared to LCDs, which average between 30 and 40 watts."
It's nice to hear of low-power CPU advancements (-particularly if you want a silent setup-) but really: how much of a problem is this? For any country to have LOTS of computers, it would have to be heavily industrialized anyway, and then,,,, the amount of energy consumed by computer CPUs would be but a tiny fraction of the total....
Your logic about AMD following the leader used to be unequivocally true.
Today, not so much. AMD really trumped Intel with the 64 bit architecture, and AMD 64 bit chips are the CPU of choice for huge numbers of gamers these days (after all, who else notices the raw speed of a processor like a gamer?)
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I think the #1 problem AMD must overcome is the relationship Intel has with Microsoft. AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS. Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software.
Right. Which is why Intel and MS have both adopted AMD's x86-64 stuff. Intel are no longer leading, they are following.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
First, I have to admit I have a preference for Intel. I always have, and I am willing to pay a premium for the name.
I used to think like you. I thought, I can't go wrong getting their latest and greatest "Pentium" thing (back in 1994 or 1995 I think). So I went ahead and spent a fortune on the processor, until I realized it was 0.9999999999 of a processor. Then I tried to get it replaced or refunded, and never was able to.
That and other things, like the F00F bug, is the reason I'll never buy anything from Intel again. And it also cured me of brand loyalty too...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well, let's see - computers used to take up entire rooms and eat thousands of watts of juice to get very little done.
Now, they eat up less per computer, and each computer does some insane order of magnitude more work, BUT: there are jillions more computers.
Reducing the power consumption per unit only matters if you have a fixed number of units. As the third world comes online, (and whats left of Moore's Law continues its march for the next few decades) it won't matter that much how little each unit consumes when there is some vastly larger magnitude of numbers of units out there suckin' juice off the mother teat grid.
Our household has 4 (working) computers, soon there will be five (when I get the powerbook working again). If EVERY household had four or five working computers all over the world over the next ten years, reducing the power consumption even by half per machine over the same amount of time wouldn't stave off the inevitable power crunch.
The result?
As things stand now: CATASTROPHE.
For more on this looming disaster, this Vug Under The Rug, go here:
DIE OFF
It's going to take a lot more than recycling, hybrids, and low power computing to avoid the disaster.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS.
Blah, blah, blah...
Congratulations on having -10e99 clue.
Microsoft makes their OS BASED on the x86 specification. You're getting it wrong from the start.
Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software.
Again more bullshit. x86 is open. Intel and Microsoft DON'T NEED TO SIT DOWN AND TALK. It just works.
Congrats on paying $$$ for an overprized, overheating, less performing chip (yes, the Intel)
But you were right, AMD K5 (and early Athlons) would overheat. Not anymore.
how long until
While a typical home user probably does have other, larger energy hogs, we have almost 300 systems between desktops and the compute farm. This would be a huge savings for us, both on the front end (direct power to run computers) and on the backend (air conditioning).
For someone with a huge sim farm (ATI, Nvidia) or other giant compute farm (google, MS), it's a phenomenal win.
By the way -- Sony sucks!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Let's say I have a small shop that wants to keep four of these babies running constantly - various Net-facing servers - and I'd like to mount just enough solar cells outside to keep this going. What are the options for installing about 150 or 200 watts of constant solar power? We're considering putting in a backup generator anyway, so could this be done competitively?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If you've haven't seen Cadillac desert, watch it. One of the stories had to do with Central Valley growers having to pay for the water they used. That's right is used to be free.
Consumption went down when they had them pay a reasonable price for the water, and now they're some of the most efficent users of water out there.
to less than 30 watts under load and less than 10 watts for Windows at idle
They're using Windows to test this? If they're keeping their boxes patched, how do we know these power consumption decreases aren't just a result of Microsoft's tireless efforts to streamline and increase the efficiency of their products?
require "something.clever";
...now how am I supposed to fry my eggs?
"I think the #1 problem AMD must overcome is the relationship Intel has with Microsoft. AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS. Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software."
AMD came up with x86-64. Microsoft was only willing to support one 64-bit extension to x86, so that's what Intel chips use; they are the clones now. And Intel is the one with compatability problems (eg DMA is broken with Intel x86-64 chip, which seriously hurts performance).
I don't support one over the other. They trade performance and price/performance crowns regularly and I'll buy whoever's ahead this quarter. Just sayin' that AMD not "just a clone" anymore.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
> AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS.
Actually, that's no longer strictly true. Remember, AMD added 64-bit goodness to the existing x86 architecture (AMD64) and Intel was forced to do the same (EM64T) in order to remain competative.
James
If AMD had some brains they would hire a few engineers to submit optimization patches to gcc for AMD processors. They could get an edge OVER intel by having the best compiler technology avaliable publicly as opposed to ICC which is difficult to integrate into open source projects as GCC is pretty much the standard.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Yes it is 100% efficient, except maybe for a tiny fraction of the light from the monitor and thermal IR that escapes out the window. If you are worried about that, close the drapes.
The heat comes from them thar Watt things. If a CPU uses less Watts it produces less heat. End of story.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Xbitlabs found that Venice uses slightly more power than Winchester (the older 0.09u core) around a month ago. They tested cores at the same speed unlike Lostcircuits, and while LC is a good site, xbit is generally better. Not to mention the guy at LC blew up a few MBs before "finding out" how to do his measurements. Aslo Xbit is the only site I know that has an accurate video card power consumption database. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/print/athlon6 4-venice.html
In other words, cautiously we project the current power consumption of all computers running somewhere in the order of at least 20 Hoover Dam power plants
.04% of the annual US oil consumption.
If 9000Mw/hrs are the equivalent of 4 Hoover dams and current estimate is 20 Hoover dams, then current consumption by CPUs is around 45,000 Mw/hrs.
This site quotes 10.9 cubic meters of oil per megawatt/hour.
If my math and sources are right, then CPUs alone, worldwide consume the equivalent of nearly 500,000 cubic meters of oil each year.
According to this site, one American barrel of oil is 0.15899 cubic meters.
That means that the power consumption of all the CPUs in the world equate to over 3 million barrels of oil/year.
Perspective? The US currently uses a bit over 20 million barrels of oil/day. So CPUs worldwide are using around the equivalent of
They will end with my new *Ostrich Ommelete* project!
Your... insensitive clods!
You talk like a man who never saw a Samsung TV next to a Sony
"As Lost Circuits points out, power consumption worldwide has been exploding as more CPUs come online and the CPU power requirements increase so a significant power reduction will reduce the burden on electrical grids everywhere."
While it's important to do whatever we can these day to conserve energy, if every now and then people would think to turn off one single light that doesn't need to be on would conserve more power than this cpu technology.
With that said, for datacenter operations this could help resolve computer room cooling issues. AMDs have historically run hotter than Intel, and I personally know of several companies in Northern Virginia that have a strict policy of Intel-cpu-only gear in the datacenters for this reason.
See, the more CPUs there are out there, the more a reduction in power for each of them matters.
The other thing, though, is economic forces: If power becomes scarce, it'll cost more; consequently, there'll be more incentive for folks to run fewer (and lower power) CPUs, use virtualization and thin-client computing to reduce the number of full-duty systems they need to purchase, etc. Further, there'll be more incentive to pay the hefty fixed costs associated with increased energy production.
In short, the market will keep things in balance -- capitalism may have its issues, but this is exactly the kind of thing it excels at.
Back in 2000, duing the California power "crisis," Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute was asked what things citizens could do to conserve power. His response: "Conserve water. The lagest consumer of power in California is electric water pumps. So if you save water, you'll save power."
Still, every little bit helps. By residents switching over from incandescents to screw-in fluorescents duing the power "crisis," California reversed approximately 8-10 years of power consumption increase (according to some estimates).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Think about it a bit ;-)
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
For some time now Intel has relied on slick marketing and big numbers while AMD did the same thing... better. Efficient computing is where AMD has gained a nice edge over the years. Intel is playing catch-up at this point. Keep it up. Competition helps us all.
Don't forget that in may large server rooms you actually end up paying twice:
1) the first time to power the chips
2) the second time to remove the waste heat in the server room.
the pay off in some cases may be more than originally anticipated.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
So you're a brand whore? Even if a brand starts selling obvious crap, you'll keep buying it because they used to be the best many years ago? That's some pretty strange logic you have there.
Sony has been making terrible products for ages. Would you buy one of their new portable MP3 players, which requires you to convert your MP3s to their proprietary MP3s using special software? As far as I'm concerned, only an idiot would buy a product like that. For TVs, Samsung is the leader now.
AMD has been leading Intel technologically ever since we entered the new millenium, and they're pulling farther ahead every day.
I think you've made a huge leap there. You've tried to imply that CPUs are what's causing the increased demand for power. That's the logical fallacy of Correlation implies causation. I'd be willing to bet that computers use very little of the additional power consumed. Think about if you lived in a developing country and had limited resources to spend, but increasing energy supplies. Would you be more likely to spend money on a PC, air conditioning, a laundry washing machine, or a TV? And of those, the PC probably uses the least energy already.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
yummy
Boxing Equipment Reviews
Yes, that all sounds about right but has absolutely zero relevance to today and AMD.
The past few years, I have started meeting some people who are fanatical about AMD, how it is better than Intel. And it is no coincidence, many of these people are die-hard linux users as well. But I remembered the old AMD k-5 chips that used to overheat. My logic was "AMD is following the leader, making imitation chips, they will never be in the lead".
I'm not sure how your "logic" follows, but AMD has had several firsts over the last few years - first to 1 GHz., first with on-chip memory controller, and first with x86-64 instruction set. AMD chips are also the highest performers on pretty much every workload except media encoding/decoding. If you're a gamer, they are the best performers these days. Plus, AMD64 CPUs are rock-solid stable, use less power, run cooler, and cost less for the same level of performance. What's not to like?
I think the #1 problem AMD must overcome is the relationship Intel has with Microsoft. AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS. Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software.
I have no idea what you're talking about here. Microsoft has been up-front about preferring AMD's 64 bit technology, and is using for all their 64 bit servers. Further, AMD is absolutely compatible with Intel, and there haven't been any publicized compatibility issues for quite a while.
And, I guess it is also an issue of name. To this day, I still buy Sony because their TV's were the cadillac of TV's when I was a kid.
Basing your purchases strictly on a company name is a good way to waste money. Do some research and buy the best product. In my opinion, on the PC CPU front, that's AMD.
Oh, one last point about AMD's current lineup - you can purchase a socket 939 motherboard today, and use an inexpensive Athlon 64 CPU for now, then later do a firmware upgrade and install a dual-core replacement once prices come down. Intel has no such upgrade path for its products.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Microsoft's marriage to Intel has broken up on a few fronts. Most importantly probably are the facts that MS's servers are now running AMD chips (look for the recent articles about Microsoft's switch to 64-bit), and that the next Xbox (Xbox360) will apparently be sporting PowerPC processor(s). The "Wintel" moniker is now mostly defunct. Maybe WMD... :-)
rooooar
There are Intels.
There are Vias and Alphas, and then
There are those that follow Sun, but
I've never been one of them.
I'm an AMD user,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about them is:
Those processors get quite warm.
You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any clothes on. You're
An AMD user the moment the grid is drained.
Because
Every watt is sacred.
Every watt is great.
If a watt is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
The G5 (PowerPC 970) has similar specs. I haven't seen new wattage numbers on the new 2.7GHz models, but I imagine they are similar. The PPC970 draws about 40 watts as far as I know.
Here's a recently updated performance benchmark on the G5.
More important are power draws and BTU's for the entire system. I've done some comparisons between the Apple Xserve and competing Opteron/Xeon/Itanium2 systems for customers, and the Xserve is usually better at total power consumption and generates less heat. Our numbers are published here. Performance numbers between cross-platform code running on an Xserve and on a comparable dual-CPU system are usually competitive, depending on what the test is. The Opteron can certainly win on synthetic benchmarks that test memory bandwidth due to the memory architecture, but most people don't actually need that bandwidth.
When testing actual customer code we're usually the same or better in performance, with lower power draw and less heat generation. As always, your mileage may vary.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
...because less heat means less fans, smaller enclosures (doesn't have to have so much room for the air to flow) i.e. __quieter__ machines.
oooh sweet...
Which models of Opteron would have these improvements?
11*43+456^2
Off topic but why does posting a comment involve receiving a port scan /.? Source address 66.35.250.150 == slashdot.org. Is this some special feature to make anon c.s less anon?
Relevant log, my IP xxx-ed out.
Who's brain is flawed? As another poster put it, where the hell do you think the other 60% of the energy goes? What makes your hard disk warm? That would be the energy spent on motion being lost as heat due to friction. Except for the very small amount of energy escaping the home as electromagnetic radiation and vibrations (far less than 1 mw), it all ends up as heat. That's exactly what happens with an electroresistive heater.
The efficiency loss is at the electrical generation side.
First, the method used by LostCircuits is not very accurate to begin with. The Fluke 80i-410 probe they used has accuracy of +-5% and a measurement floor of 2.5A. A current probe with a lower measurement floor like this one would have been a better choice. There is at least another case (XbitLabs) where a similar measurement showed that Venice uses more power than Winchester at the same frequency. Unfortunately, XBitLabs test doesn't mention which current probe was used.
Even if we assume that the current measurements were accurate, it is almost impossible to come to conclusions about the Venice core being more efficient than the Winchester core based on observations from one sample each. Note that the observed current consumption between the Venice core and the Winchester core is within a few percent of each other in most of the tests run by LostCircuits. You may see more than that much difference between samples from different production runs of the same core. The only thing that the Lostcircuits test proves is that AMD's 90nm cores are more power efficient that their 130nm cores...
That's an excellent idea, hope someone at AMD reads this.
Um, what exactly is Intel following? Obviously not AMDs abyssmal earnings, piss-poor fabrication, complete lack of OEM support (compilers, chipsets, etc.)...
64-bit instructions? You mean AMDs massive marketing-hype program that forced Intel to release a completely unnecessary technology? Ooooh! One feature! I'm so impressed!
Yes, a win for AMD on the tech-hype front. Kudos. Didja notice how that something everyone who bashes Intel for doing is suddenly interpreting as portent of salvation.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I think you meant 10e-99, cowboy.
Your average computer uses about as much power as a 150 watt lightbulb. Sure it adds up, but there are a LOT of lightbulbs out there! Taxing the electric grid doesn't seem to be nearly as big of a problem as things like battery life on laptops.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Intel hasn't sat on their ass though. I suspect very soon a desktop version of the Pentium-M (possibly with 64-bit support) that will trash the AMD's (not only with a better CPU, but you get much better motherboards and chipsets on the Intel side).
Lowering the power consumption per core is a first step to upping the number of cores
:)
I find this odd, considering one of the main advantages of having dual-core computers is the lower power consumption for a given performance level.
Course who says, "yes, that's enough horsepower for me all-else-considered".. I would think most would say, what's the max horsepower I can get for my money (including other requirements). But still, it's feasible that laptops are where power-consuption is most concerned, so dual-proc 1.5GHZ machines might be desirable to keep power low and Horse-power high.
-Michael
It's the 70's calling. They want their apocalyptic, 'global disaster' drivel back.
Not faster per CPU clock if you count the Pentium-M.
CPUs are not generally marketed with their internal code names... How do I identify the CPU as a "Venice" core when buying it?
I currently use a A64 3400+, and with Cool 'n Quiet, it runs cool most of the time. In fact, the fan on the CPU heat sink is off for the most part. But, I would love an even cooler running CPU, so maybe even under load the fan would not need to kick in.
Also, I don't suppose they will be offering this core in a Socket754 variant.. I have the older A64 motherboard (that's what I get for being an early adopter).
They check occasionally and cache the result, so you won't get scanned every time you post.
Don't confuse energy with price. Electricity is about the most expensive form of energy. If your heating runs on natural gas or petrol, you pay more for heat generated by your computer than for heat generated by your dedicated heating system ;).
And if you use a heat pump, or are connected to "urban heating" (sp?) the computer looks bad even energy-wise (yes, the computer's heating efficiency is indeed 100%, but heat pump is more than 100% efficient because it works by sucking additional energy out of the ground...).
The efficiency loss is at the electrical generation side.
Exactly.
BTW: I didn't intend for that to become a link (I deliberately left out the anchor tags). Click it at your own risk.
Pathscale, Sun Studio 10. Both are great (commercial) compilers. Only make sense for "scientific" code running on a bad-ass Opteron clusters, though, biggest benefit is the parallelization support. It's a somewhat different market too, gcc supports just about everything out there, which makes progress in some areas slow (The SSA stuff in gcc 4.0 helps, but it's just a foundation for cool stuff). And it's what
people develop open source software for, even those people that don't know that much about writing portable code, so anything != gcc is a hassle.
AMD is also working with the GCC people too (including engineer hours on actually improving the code, I believe), there was a recent post on comp.arch about this.
P4 based laptops. Talk about your hot nutz.
Anyway the reason for scratching(head) is that my 3 year warranty on the Fujitsu runs out next July so I'll be wanting a replacement come next May, provided I'm still on the sunny side of the grass. Along with this has been a keen interest in glomming on to one of those new Athlon 64 puppies. Almost drove up to Fry's today for the $199 Athlon 64 3200+ including motherboard with SATA and gigabit ethernet.
Well now I'm gonna wait. Wait for a laptop with this new Venitian boatman at the helm. I'll have speed, long battery life, 64bits, and best of all a cool cucumber.
I do lots of number crunching, and don't find much of a difference (~2%) in my codebase between icc/gcc/mscc these days. ICC is great for code that hasn't been carefully written, but once you do the optimization stuff by hand the other compilers do fine. YMMV of course.
However, I haven't found anything to equal IPP (Intel Performance Primitives) for AMD...it offers a _huge_ value.
Radio Waves.
Except the Windows and AMD actually do exist...
LOL, you're joking, right?
Samsung?! OK, sometimes nice stuff but Sony leads in TV's. Ha!
x86-64 is a crappy 64 bit hack onto the x86. I wouldn't call it innovating, ms picked it because it was only architecture that could run 32bit x86 decently.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
If an Athlon can no longer cook the same recipes as Intel's stuff (Pentium Pie, anyone?) does that mean they're no longer fully Intel-compatible?
The toilet in my bathroom broke a few years back, so we replaced it with a low volume Toto. We were going to get a power assisted flush one, but the plumber recommended this. Thankfully he did, though, because this one is much better! It will flush anything while barely using any water, it is quite, and it fills up again really fast (for those very rare instances when you can't get it all down in one flush). It clogs way less than the previous high volume toilet we had. Toto rocks.
This is just in time for my next Nvida PCI-E video card with two 75 watt auxiliary power connectors in addition to the 75W through the socket.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The current - how fast the electricity flows - is obviously a function of the clock speed, as you've got to move charge fast enough to change the states. Since voltage is directly proportional to current (V=IR), reducing the voltage must also reduce the current.
eg: a chip that operates on two voltages - 0v and +5v - at 1 gigaherts has got to carry sufficient current to shift 5v worth of charge a billion times a second.
The "obvious" way to reduce power requirements is to reduce current, as power is proportional to the square of the current and only directly proportional to resistance. A small change in the current will have a substantially larger impact than a equal sized change in the resistance.
Reducing the voltage as a way to reduce current is one possibility, but there's leakage between lines and interference from outside sources. You'd want some good screening to do this significantly. Otherwise, you'd not be able to tell the difference between real signal and noise.
Reducing the absolute clock speed would also work, but you'd need to balance things in order to keep the same performance. eg: If you double all of the busses and caches, you would be able to do more for the same number of clock cycles and could therefore reduce the clock cycles.
Another option would be to move "trivial" functions into memory, with the output being copied to the processor as-needed. The idea here is that not all instructions require all of the resources of the CPU and therefore don't need to contribute to the heating of the CPU.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah, I noticed similar results with icc -- great for making my first implementation go faster.
Incidentially, I notice a similar benefit with AMD -- say I've got a 2.8GHz intel and a 2800+ AMD then my 2800+ will outperform the intel machine before hand optimisation (redesigning the code, not tweaking ASM) but after optimisation the difference is much smaller.
What you say about upgrading to dual core is true (if the PR is to be believed anyway). However, every time I've tried to do anything like that in the past it hasn't worked out. The cost of a MB is minor compared to the cost of the new chip (especially since the new MB will have goodies like firewire which my current one doesn't). Plus if you upgrade your CPU you have to a) install it, and b) throw away the old one.
Put simply, I'd rather 'waste' $100 buying a new MB and sell my old MB+CPU (for say $100?). The market for 2nd hand CPUs is pretty awful so I'd be surprised if you get more than $20 (with $0 wasted on a MB).
I look into this now and then (Nanosolar might be promising) and I will be using solar power during day time hours only to lower power usage. I won't bother with batteries- they seem to be a system cost killer.
If you hook it up to your basic power, you need a special electrical switchbox. But you could hook it up to some peltier cooling devices and some LED light fixtures perhaps. And you can pick up a couple 100 watt panels for 400 to 600 dollars and only power your computer with them during the day.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Does anyone know if these suposedly green PC's are any better, and if specialised computers like the playstation save eneryy? Also if energy is such a BFD how do we go about debunking the FUD around better energy sources?
You won't get much for that old CPU, but on the other hand if you can get around a 90% throughput improvement for a couple hundred dollars, I'd say that's a good upgrade myself. Most CPU replacment upgrades in the past only got you 10-20% performance improvement for a big investment.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
...I'll never buy anything from Intel again. And it also cured me of brand loyalty too...
Seems like an oxymoron to me. Completely avoiding a brand based on one bad experience is as foolish as being completely loyal based on one good experience.
If you never buy Intel, do you use a Mac, Sparc, or are you loyal to AMD?
Yeah AMD has something. It's called the Intel C Compiler.
No seriously...many of the optimizations in there will also affect an AMD chip. AMD reaps the benefits of Intel's work, especially SSE1/2/3 once they release chips with their implementation.
This is NOT to say there aren't more things that AMD could be optimizing with their own compiler (or gcc patches like you said), it's just that I've seen many situations where any time the ICC improves an Intel chip's performance, it is improved by similar amounts on a comparable AMD chip.
occurs here only in percentage terms.
20 watts=1/2 of a standard light bulb.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
it's the monitors and the fans to keep the chips cool.
Want to save energy? Buy an LCD screen - that will save half the power right there.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
> Windows NT would NOT work with Cyrix, it kept locking up.
I owned a Cyrix based computer with NT 4 - it had no locking issues. Cyrix tried to run the PCI bus out of spec. If you weren't selective about your expansion cards they could cause the machine to lock. But Cyrix CPUs worked fine with NT4.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
I'd like to make a low-power consumption system and I've found it extremely difficult to find information on the heat generation of system components. Neither NVidia or ATI mention power consumption outside of mobile chips anywhere on their websites. Look on the boxes of the video cards? Nada. Review sites? Very slim info, and what little is out there conflicts. After spending a week off an on scouring the web I eventually got a 6600GT which in several articles was praised for being lower power. However, it still requires an supplemental power plug and generates a ton of heat.
My first TV was branded a Philips. But, under the covers, it was all Samsung. It lasted for about a dozen years, not bad considering how inexpensive it was. Hardly anybody in the U.S. would have even heard of the Samsung brand back then.
Also Sony USED to be good. Now they just build things as cheaply as possible. The headphones they supply with their players sound like crap.
Do you think CPUs account worldwide for 3/4 of US oil consumption?
Don't you think that it's more reasonable that the math is correct, but just predicated on incorrect numbers given in the parent article about how much power CPUs use in Hoover Dam equivalents?
If you read the article page 7 & 11 (idle vs burn-in and conclusions), you'll see that the winchester (first 90nm core) dropped consumption in half compared to newcastle, and venice improves upon winchester by 10-15% by 1)lower consumption at idle and 2) better IPS throughput on equal mhz.
x86-64 is a crappy 64 bit hack onto the x86. I wouldn't call it innovating, ms picked it because it was only architecture that could run 32bit x86 decently.
The proof is in the pudding.
The x86 itself is just a big pile of hacks, so I don't see the problem with hacking another addition on top of it. But all the performance figures I've seen show the x86-64 performance to be very good. What are you more concerned with? How elegant the architecture of your CPU is, or how fast it performs and at what price (and what power consumption)?
Intel tried doing an all-new 64-bit design, called Itanium, and it's been a disaster. Who uses them? Not very many. They're extremely expensive, they consume tons of power, and their performance is very lackluster. Intel claims the problem is with the compilers, or with the software developers, but the real problem is they tried to do something all new with their EPIC architecture and it was a terrible idea. But AMD's 64-bit chips are selling like hotcakes, and in their price range perform excellently.
In the marketplace, what matters is making products that people want. Innovation is useless if no one wants the results of that innovation (especially when they don't even live up to their prior claims).
I just realised how few Intel chips I've ever had. My 8086 was an Intel, as was my 386. My 486 was an Cyrix, and it was a POS, and after that, I've had nothing but AMD. I moved on to a K5, then a K6, an Athlon-XP, and now an Athlon64.
Up to and including the K6, it was purely a cost issue. I never had any issues with the AMDs, despite the heat. You just need to cool them better, and not try to save a few pennies on that side of things. That's been true since the K5.
With regards to Cyrix, they never made a decent X86-compatible chip in the lifespan of the company, this much is true, but AMD are not the same.
When the Athlon-XP came out, it was no longer a cost issue. Accept no substititutes, it had to be an Authentic AMD for me. That was based upon their proven track record of good service. YMMV.
I'm typing this on a Athlon-64 box that is as reliable as anything I've ever owned, and is currently running with a core temperature of 45C.
I could make that lower, but I'd need to turn my fans up. That temp is under load, mind you. Prescott cores run way hotter than that, I'm pretty sure.
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Yes, they are somewhat opposite, aren't they? The Xbit review provides some graphs of power consumption and generally finds that the Winchester and Venice core have similar profiles but does not mention how they were able to make those measurements. The Lost Circuits review OTOH provides enough detail on their power measurement procedure to allow someone else to reproduce their results. More importantly, the Lost Circuits information shows just how difficult and time consuming it really was to measure the CPU power consumption with the consistency, precision, and accuracy needed to draw real conclusions. Finally, both reviews provided photos of the "venice" processors but only the Lost Circuits photo accurately showed the new 1.4V core voltage rating. This omission makes it questionable that Xbitlabs even had a true "venice" core for their testing. For these reasons, I put much more credibility on the Lost Circuits results than the Xbitlabs results.
Before worrying about the power consumption of CPU's, shouldn't we switch off the lights at the commercial bldgs in the night? I am sure that will save a lot of electricity for us to have MANY more CPU's in the future.
Signature is for people who have more than a dollar in their bank accounts.
What the hell is a Mw/hr?! Power plant output is given in MW if you want to be useful. If you're trying to give us energy use units of energy (like MWh or J or hell even eV). I get about 2000 MW power output from the Hoover Dam, or on the order of 20,000,000 computers using 100W off the power grid (about 30 watts for the CPU with some negligible amount for RAM, and assuming a 33% efficiency for the power supply).
The trend, in server-class hardware at least, is toward lower power consumption. With the move toward smaller servers, many companies are finding that it's difficult to provide power and cooling to a rack of power-hugry 1U servers.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
"You know that loud whirring coming from your computer? And have you noticed how things get hot just sitting on top of it?"
"...no? Oh, you must have an AMD"
"INTELOUTSIDEINTHEGARBAGEBOOYA!!"
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Especially because you not only have to pay for the electricity, but then also for the cooling system to get rid of all that heat.
As Lost Circuits points out, power consumption worldwide has been exploding as more CPUs come online and the CPU power requirements increase so a significant power reduction will reduce the burden on electrical grids everywhere.
Does anyone here truly believe that any big increase in power consumption is due to people buying power-hungry computers? Ever heard of these high tech devices commonly referred to as "air conditioning", "washing machines", "water heaters", and "incandescent lights"? You tell me which one of the above devices consumes the most power. It won't be a personal computer, that's for sure.
Here, in DC, it's not cool enough to get benefits by using a P4 as a heater. Instead, we get to worry about excess costs for air conditioning 3/4ths of the year.
Yes, the computing may replace a heater - we just don't use heaters in the summer.
> Windows NT would NOT work with Cyrix, it kept
> locking up.
I love it when idiots post this fucking drivel.
I clicked it. Will this post appear?
I think the motherboard I bought needs its BIOS upgraded, and I don't have any Athlon64s on hand. If it can't POST, I can't upgrade the BIOS.
That's not always true. This page gives instructions for an Asus A8V (yes, you'll need a floppy drive, but they haven't changed in 15 years so you can just pull one from an old computer). Other boards probably have similar features, check the manual.
No it won't
Damn!
I think he normaly gets like a 2 for being a good little karma whore. That he's been mushed down to 0 shows just how much his ideas piss off the fuckin 'tards who do a lot of moderating around here. I wouldn't be surprised if he's on some right wing dickwad's hit list via the enemy of friends list thing.
Typical fuckin' jive ass cracka muthafuckazzz...
Mod my boy up, cowardly ass lickin shit bagz...
here in the uk i don't think i have EVER seen a urinal in the home
shops collages universitis offices tourist attractions etc sure they have urinals but never in the home.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So if AMD will be producing some shit tomorrow, you'll buy it, because it's AMD?
Heat Pump
Heat Pump was a famous 1337 h4xx0r who established the underground community known as 1337 HeatPumpology.
Controversy
Some thought Heat Pump was a closet Nazi due to his radical views on heat pumps. This view is supported strongly by an entry in a blog dated 2003.
----
Wikipedia is a fun site, but a piss poor encyclopedia of anything. Most of the entries are so badly and amateurishly written they make your flesh creep. It was a good idea that just didn't work.
Well. Cyrix 5x86 and 6x86 chips where good.
It had two problems. First they couldn't predict at design phase the features intel was going to add and they lacked some PENTIUM compability while they where compatible with older x86 chips.
2ndly Their floating point performance was lackluster. Although their integer performance was great.
Quake was one of rare cases where it bite really. Since normally even with floating point applications the integer performance is the key, and floating point performance is only secondary as those are rare instructions in the instructions mix anyway. Too bad for cyrix quake became THE benchmark to evaluate the performance.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
>AMD Venice
You mean it's water-cooled?
Emits signals ... and radioactive waves.
.. NOTHING IN LIFE IS FREE!!! .....
of some sorts...
which can cause health issues.
if prolonged use.
bad conditions - un environmently friendly.
PLEASE KEEP IT REAL
Every take action costs somebody something
Somehow.
even if it's not you directly at that point In time.
NOTHING.
EVery take action has a cost - cause and effect
reaction - either positive or negative.
If AMD had some brains they would hire a few engineers to submit optimization patches to gcc for AMD processors.
They did - they paid SuSE to do the original work and some performance work. I'm not sure if that's still ongoing, though.
AMD64 is definitely on the GCC radar - it's now in the list of primary release platforms and they're taking AMD64 performance seriously for future versions. But it's slow progress and ICC has a big lead.
Your figure of 10 cars of coal to crack RC5 are misleading. First of all, most of the electricity produced was not the result of burning coal. Second of all, if is hard to determine the actual amount of any fuel used to create a given amount of electricity because the efficiency of generators varies between units and the efficiency of a specific unit varies depending on the load, properties of the fuel, etc. Third, distribution of electricity has variable efficiency, depending on distance and the design of the grid (high voltage line transport electric current more efficiently).
Next there's the consumption on the consumer end. You assume that these systems are doing NOTHING but cracing RC5, and would be turned off if they were not cracking RC5. I know that many organizations leave their workstations on all night, so they would not be used otherwise, therefore RC5's use of these workstations cost nothing. That was then. These days, however, CPUs like the Pentium-M scale CPU speed to application demand, so RC5 WOULD use more power than and idle workstation.
In summary, I find such polticially charged, off-the-cuff calculations as you are presenting to be worse than useless. It is acceptable to say that a CPU that uses less electricity does present environmental benefits. It isn't acceptable to make such very rough estimates of CPU power to coal consumption, and use them in any argument.
Well, it was also with several other 3d-games that was important, and since I am a gamer, I make no excuse for calling any chip without decent floating foint performance a POS. Sorry, but I'm not going to buy junk for no reason. Even if I didn't regularly require floating foint performance, then I still wouldn't have bought one, because I want something that is a quality piece of equipment. That's why I won't buy anything other than AMD nowadays. Hell, it's same reason I won't buy an ECS motherboard, no matter how cheap. I had one once, and it was a huge piece of junk.
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ANY x86 is a crap when talking about floating point. Especially when talking about that era. It was about the time when fastest x86 got 1/4 floating point performance of fastest risc. But on integer side the difference was smaller. So both floating point and integer performance scale have many different points where chips reside. From what I recall Cyrix 6x86 price was equal to a pentium with equal floating point performance while delivering much better integer performance by having superiour architecture. But the thing that gave them bad reputation was that people without realizing overclocked their chips 25% by setting the MB run at frequency of the rating instead of frequency it was supposed to run, and then wondering what gave them strange errors, and being without some extensions intel added with their latests chip just like nowadays AMD was without SS3 for a while except that at the day some people used those extensions and users that used ANYTHING BUT INTEL PENTIUM got hurt at the time.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.