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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."
Last I heard power = heat. (more or less) What you are talking about is the older AMD models did not power down when they were overheated. Mine did that for me when my liquid cooler system ran low on coolant (don't know where it went)
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
"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
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"
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.
> 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.
That's what you get for being a cheap-ass and buying the cheapest toilet you can find. If you'd buy a high-quality (over $125) 1.6gpf toilet, it'd flush the crap just as effectively as any 3.5gpf toilet, and probably better.
I've had lots of 3.5gpf toilets clog on me; does that mean they all suck too? The high-efficiency toilets have gotten a bad rap because stupid house builders, who buy the cheapest crap they can find in order to maximize their profit, installed cheap toilets. So now that everyone's stuck with them (and they're apparently all too damn cheap to go to Home Depot or Lowes and get an American Standard Cadet II for $150 or so), they sit around whining about government regulations instead of blaming their builder.
The government probably should have instituted a minimum performance test when they instituted the 1.6gpf requirement.
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
It may not save the world, but when you combine just a small amount of power saving over a large amount then it at least SLOWS the power crunch. Simply dismissing saving on power consumption because you think its too late already is just wishing disaster to happen. Your line of thinking is man kind may as well kill himself now and not even bother trying to save itself any further. I agree the mext few decades could be bleak, but im certainly not inviting it to arrive any faster so I can say "HAH! look we told you so!" which a lot of the die off, peak oil forums etc etc seem to be courting from survivalists.
Laptop Reviews
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.
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
...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...
"radio telescopy is the least likely method of contacting extra terrestrials"
Sorry. I am going to have to call *BULLSHIT* on that one. There are an almost infinite number of methods which are even less likely to contact them.
Take for instance me making a paper plane and writing a message to any aliens on it. Then I throw it into the air.
Which is more likely to be successful? SETI or my paper plane?
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...
50% of the United State's electricity is generated by burning coal in old style boilers, and that's been on the rise for the last 40 years. It's just about the only type of plant with real growth prospects right now.
I'm not saying I agree with using coal, but you should learn something about how this country gets its energy before you spout off about coal.
So with the 50% marker in mind, we probably burned about 5 trains filled with coal. If the grandparent didn't account for plant efficiency, it's more like 15 trains full just to break RC-64.
Jeff
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.
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.
"Here's a recently updated performance benchmark on the G5."
No, it's not. It's an Apple marketing piece. As is the other iterm that you linked.
DO NOT trust manufacturer benchmarks. They are always manipulated - usually by careful choice of the tests run.
Let me guess, you work for Apple?
"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."
It can also win on applications that use lots of memory bandwidth. Databases, for example, are almost always bandwidth-hungry. So are distributed filesystems. Many technical and scientific computing applications are also memory-bound.
"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."
Our mileage does vary. My company has compared PPC970, Xeon, and Opteron using the SAN solution that we integrate, and Opteron is the clear winner. For database systems as well, Opteron is 20-30% faster than Xeon and PPC970.
Moreover, XServe doesn't support more than 8GB of memory. That's simply not enough for our customers. Heck, the 64GB provided by HP's DL585 *still* isn't enough.
Look, Apple has some nice products, but without a true commercially-supported Linux distro, it's hard to sell your product. People buying servers want Linux or Windows, and they want something that is supported by the vendor.
Whale oil was a luxury good. Petroleum is the foundation of our society. We will hit the peak sooner or later, and we need to deal with that fact. I don't think there have been too many new breeder reactors built in your town lately.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
"So, for 20% to 30% more performance, according to your numbers"
20% to 30% PER CPU. The DL585 is a 4-way (soon to be 8-way) box with iLO, 64GB memory capacity, and a whole swath of other features that the XServe G5 cannot match. You cannot run an enterprise-class DBMS on the XServe - it doesn't even have redundant power.
You *cannot* compare a 64GB, 4/8-way Opteron server with redundant power and cooling to the XServe G5. Hell, can you even replace the fans in the G5 while it's on?
"But, I do think it illustrates my point that the Xserve often has better price/performance when you factor in power and cooling expense."
The XServe is not an enterprise-class server. It lacks the features that even many low-end PC servers have - important things like redundant power, SCSI, and large memory capabilities.
Downtime is not acceptable. It's not OK to have the DB server crash because the PSU crapped out. It's not OK to have to take it offline to replace dead fans or dead disks.
Oh, and again, our customers want Linux or (in some cases) Windows. Not a "BSD-based" commercial OS.
Try getting Oracle to run on OS X server.