Chipmakers Admit Your Power May Vary

Dylan Knight Rogers writes to mention a News.com story discussing the realities of chip power consumption. From the article: "Assessing only pure performance is passe. The debate these days is about performance-per-watt, which seems like it should be a simple miles-per-gallon type of calculation. However, miles are miles, and gallons are gallons. There's no one simple way to measure processor performance, and measuring the amount of power output by today's chips is proving just as difficult."

Comments

Re:I would like to know...

[Sebastopol]

Dude, that was the WORST answer I've ever seen. Either you never took an electronics class, or you failed.

Here's the short answer to the GP:

A fixed amount of energy is needed for any computation (dividing a number, or flipping the output of an inverter), the amount of energy depends on the architecture or process, but just pick any value for now.

Power is the integral of energy over time.

As the frequency increases, that same amount of energy mentioned before is needed in a shorter amount of time. Hence power goes up.