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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
awesomeeeee
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.
DUAL NIGGER CORE!!!! DOUBLE GAY NIGGERS HAH
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FIRST POZZERT! do i not fail it???
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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
Does anyone here give a rats ass about electrical grids and their afore mentioned stress. I know this AC doesn't give a shit.
at least the game is still on for heater and toaster jokes about P4s on slashdot (...those intel chips are, like, so hot you heat your house with them....). I should do one of those, they always score a 5 funny and I could use the karma.
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.
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 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.
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.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
"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....
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.
It's an even exchange and 100% efficient.
you are either 12 or really really dumb.
NOTHING is 100% efficient. and your computer as a heater or computing device or BOTH are nowhere NEAR 100% efficient.
I would look at it is closer to 40% efficient. some is spent as light, some is spent as motion some as heat. but NEVER 100% efficient and is certianly vastly more expensive to operate per BTU as a heater than a quartz heater of the same capacity.
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.
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?
to stick your pee pee in my poo poo hole.
http://www.gay-sex-access.com/
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!
Haha u r teh gay
"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+
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
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...
FREEEEST PEIEIEIEST
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.
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.
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.
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.
Radio Waves.
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)
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?
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! --
you insensitive clod!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
>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.
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.