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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
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...
You are thinking Pre-2000. AMD has run cooler than Intel, cycle per cycle, for a while now. This is in addition to getting more work done per cycle. The days of AMD being used to toast marshmellows was a loooong time ago. I have both in servers. My dual Xeon server is a fine example of a great system that requires 6000btu of AC to keep a room at 72F. Great box, great cpu, unreal heat.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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)
... 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
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.
"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."
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."
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.
By the way -- Sony sucks!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"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
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
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.
You need to get a solar chart for your area of the world, and look up the equivalent insolation in terms of hours. Around here, we get an equivalent of 3.5 hours of maximum sunlight per day, averaged over the course of the year. Assuming your numbers are similar, you'll need about (24/3.5)*200 watts worth of solar panels -- that's 1370 watts. Assuming you get a great deal, you might pay $2.25 per watt, uninstalled cost, so that's over $3000 just for the panels. You'd also have to build a mounting system and possibly install a small motor to keep the panels pointed in the optimum direction.
On top of that, you need a battery system to provide power during hours of darkness. I could continue BS'ing the numbers to figure out how many batteries you'd need but would rather not. Needless to say, it's going to be several thousand dollars for the whole system.
(Yes, I've done this before)
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
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...
Look here (EVERY SLASHDOTTER SHOULD READ THIS):
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Section called "Won't the Market and the Laws of
Supply and Demand Address This?"
The answer is "No". Basically, to retrofit all the systems to use other sources of energy will take a lot more years than we'll have by the time the market forces factor into it.
The market is also not perfectly rational, nor slow to react... if the problem is perceived to be serious, the market will explode overnight.
The oil companies are even faster than the market.
(for example, they are currently swimming in record profits because they upped the prices at the first sign of crude oil's price jump, despite the fact that they were still selling gas they produced at much lower prices of crude oil).
I love the textbook answer, but I think we're placing too much faith in the almighty market.
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
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...
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.
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.
Maxwell's demon. Deep.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
WTF??
Two other people have already said the same thing, but I'm going to repeat it. Either you live in some weird country where toilets are all different, or you're just ignorant. Here in the US (should be obvious since I mentioned Home Depot and Lowes), toilets are all the same. There's a supply line on the lower left side (viewed from front), and a drain on the bottom. There's two bolts on either side of the drain.
To replace, you disconnect the supply line, remove the nuts from the bolts, and just lift the toilet up. Then, replace the wax ring on the flange (costs about $4; wear gloves), sit the new toilet down on the flange/ring and seat firmly. Put the nuts back on (and decorative covers), connect the supply line (a flexible line, ~$10, is a good idea), turn on the water, and you're done.
Of all the plumbing jobs out there, replacing a toilet is one of the easiest. With faucets, you have to worry about whether the sink has 1 hole or 3 holes or whatever. But toilets are all the same. Even the fancy pressurized toilets still install exactly the same way as the regular gravity-operated ones, although their internal operation is completely different.
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."
If you really are looking into getting a backup generator, you may just want to look into getting a CHP (combined heat and power) system for your shop instead. A CHP system will generate electricity for you, as well as allow you to use the waste heat from the generator to heat your shop, hot water, or use an absorption cooling device to cool your shop (although I've never seen one of these for a small-scale application). The CHP system would essentially eliminate or drastically reduce your need for energy from the grid, and probably save you a few bucks in the long run as well. There are only a few manufacturers out there right now though for smaller scale CHP systems (namely Honda, but I think there are a one or two others), and it also may depend on where you're situated (sometimes they will not let you purchase one unless your power company is actively involved in supporting CHP systems).
:)
Overall it would likely save you a ton of money as you could just purchase natural gas instead of electricity. When you factor in generation costs, demand costs, transmission and hookup costs, peak load costs, etc from the electric company, it quickly makes sense to just generate the electricity yourself. Also, unless you have an electric heater for your home, you're probably already having to buy natural gas anyway so there's no additional hookup charge from the gas company.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you had other shops/stores/residences near you that were interested in doing this it would be fairly simple to install a larger system, split the cost of the system, then just split up the gas bill accordingly (depending on how confident you are that your neighbors will pay on time of course
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.
The coal argument is often used...however it is always used wrongly....the 300 year projection is based on current usage...not usage in trying to replace oil and further population growth. In which case coal is only projected to last 90 years at most. Still a fair while, but not as rosy as 300 years. http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-7/p47.html# cap4
Laptop Reviews
> 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
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
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.
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.
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
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.
I have to say this: For someone who posts on Slashdot you sure know your shit.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Which models of Opteron would have these improvements?
Opteron 252 (Troy core) and all dual-core Opterons. If you're building servers, you'll want the dual-cores.
usually, the one in the kitchen gets the most use, as it involves less stair traversal from the living room.
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.