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Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
DeviceGuru writes "Taiwanese chip and board vendor Via Technologies has introduced a new ultra-low voltage (ULV) processor aimed at industrial, commercial, and ultra-mobile applications. Touted as the world's most power-efficient x86-compatible CPU, the 500MHz 'Eden ULV 500' processor debuted at an Embedded Systems Conference in Taipei this week. Via says its chip draws a minimum of 0.1 Watts, when idle, and a maximum of 1 Watt, making it a great candidate for consumer electronics devices such as UMPCs, PVRs, and such."
A nice laptop cpu if I ever saw one.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
How does this chip compare in performance per watt against ARM, PowerPC and the like?
The article doesn't say what socket and interface the chip uses. Are they still on Socket 370?
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Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these....
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... does it run Linux ?
My mythtv PVR uses the MII12000 (1.2GHz), which is rated at
20-30W. With HDD, DVD, encoder card etc, it draws 80W on start,
and somewhere between 30-60W when running.
Take 10-20W off my figures by using their 1.5GHz ULV
and you get potentially more processing power at less
than 50W!
I know that VIA chips are pretty feeble (i.e. their 1.5GHz
chip is probably closer to a 1GHz intel chip), but with an
encoder card (dual actually) I can be recording two
channels with the CPU at 10%. Given their mobos have
mpeg decoders on board, I can add watching a DVD or TV
for another 30-40% CPU time.
The only thing is ad-skipping and re-encoding are pretty
slow.
Why not make 64 of these on a single chip? 64W + some additional overhead shouldn't be bad.
Put this in SBC (Single Board Computer) form together with wireless support and a nice sized flash hard drive would make it ideal for applications such as home monitoring and other uses around the typical house for us home automation geeks.
I wonder, how far can these things be overclocked? Certainly there shouldn't be a problem with cooling, so it should be possible to push these things to the maximum they're capable of.
Without actually taking the time to do any calculations, shouldn't this chip be a little weak to be powering PVRs and other media devices? With the proliferation of HD, I see more and more people (thankfully) going to h.264 to reduce their file sizes. However, to play a 720p file that is encoded with h.264, you need some serious punch in the processing realm. Recording/encoding to h.264 is a level far beyond that. I don't have the specs in front of me, but even the most minimal player is going to require more than 500 MHz. Now, if you're talking about a few of these in one system you may be on the right track. Anyone have more experience than me in this kind of thing and can comment further?
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Isn't everybody always complaining how x86 is an awefull archtecture dragging 20 years of backward compatibility like a block of concrete? A one watt processor surely aims at the mobile/embedded market. Backward compatibility is not an issue there. I can't see anybody running his old Windows 3.11 accounting software on his mobile, and this thing won't come with a "Vista-ready" sticker...
Linux and Windows CE (or whatever they call it today) run just fine on ARM and similar. Will a low-power x86 compete performance-wise with a low-power RISK architecture?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I wish the EU would start rating PCs by their energy consumption, perhaps accompanied by an energy tax for the worst categories. The amount of power in a modern PC from CPUs & GPUs wasted as heat, fans etc. is just ridiculous.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_9864,00.html
I'm sure that the AMD CPU has better performance per MHz than the VIA one, although I didn't bother to find facts about that.
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Soekris is now shipping a New and Improved product, the net5501. Early reports suggest that this is their first product that's able to route at line speed. I have two on order that I should receive next week.
The release of Vista suggests that we need more and more powerful systems to do our work, but the irony, at least for me, is that I keep buying more of the little guys. Being able to use fanless cases and/or flash drives is a definite selling point, but there's a surprising amount of processing power available in such products and their uses are as limitless as your own imagination. Besides, hacking those ubiquitous blue boxes can never be as satisfying as building your own.
The VIA units I own could be described as underpowered, but having onboard MPEG decoders, for example, can make up for the shortcomings.
It should make things much easier for people to install linux and write apps. Imagine being able to buy a dvr, install linux on it, and start running some software you downloaded... or better yet, something you wrote yourslef.
To clarify, if the EU slapped a tax on the worst offending PCs, it might focus consumers and the industry on producing more efficient designs. Most domestic appliances such as fridges and dishwashers already get rated in the EU and it clearly does shape people's decisions.
I construct, install and maintain automatic weather stations at remote sites. They are solar-powered systems usually. I've mostly been using the 533 MHz Edens since they were first released and been very happy with them. Although I don't make much use of the video decoding, I've yet to run into any problems with these CPUs, or mini-ITX systems in general.
No driver issues and the documentation has been more than adequate for my needs. The total cost of these off-the-shelf consumer-level setups is a fraction of that for an equivalent embedded system and can do more than just log and transmit data from a weather station, something techs and operators appreciate when they're working on them at remote locations.
Let's not forget that not everybody is fixated on kick-ass in-car theater systems, or uber-1337 gaming rigs.
That is like saying that there should be a tax on buying a non-econobox car.
Yes, some people want to buy a video card that requires some amps to play the current games. Some people want to buy a car that performs well. (I'm not talking about SUVs or huge waste hogs)
Everyone pays for the power they consume, be it gasoline or electricity. Who cares?
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
As the first Beowulf comment, it cannot be Redundant.
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The TFA has a chart which shows a 1.5Ghz part with a 7.5W TDP. That's 3x the mhz for 7.5x the power. Will VIA's technology scale relatively easily, say a 2.5Ghz chip with 20W TDP?
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... yawn
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Exactly. Who cares? People are generally selfish and sometimes you must do things that benefit people as a whole instead of individuals. If slapping a tax on the most energy consuming devices in some category causes people to buy the more efficient ones, that is a benefit to every one. If you still want to buy that device despite the tax then nobody is stopping you. But I guarantee that for everyone who does than many more will choose one which doesn't.
It does not mean either that you're getting a crappier machine as a result. While there is a relationship between CPU / GPU performance and power, I doubt it is a 1:1 mapping. Some processors and GPUs are going to deliver more operations per watt than others. Companies and consumers should be encouraged to favour the more efficient designs over the less efficient designs and a tax for the worst offenders in any class is one way of going about that.
Not sure if parent was a joke, but i found it funny.
In some EU countries economic cars have less yearly tax already, I think it's calculated from the CO2 emission pr. km.
And cars that can't perform 15km/l or more, have had their price tax raised, while longer running ones have had it reduced.
If I was as pragmatic and objective as I claim to be, would I be commenting?
Ireland sets the rate of annual motor tax based on the size of the vehicle engine. Someone with a 1.6 litre engine pays over a hundred more euros than someone with a 1.3 litre engine. It's probably explains why SUVs are quite scarce in Ireland. Which isn't a bad thing at all.
I seem to have had the impression that my Soekris firewalls, running a National (today AMD) Geode SC1100 at 266MHz, a P1-class CPU that, coupled with 3 100MBit NICs, 128MB of RAM, IDE, USB etc eat a whopping 3-5 Watts for the entire machine, was x86.
The FreeBSD kernel I run on them seems to think so too.
Kudos to Via for taking ULV to a whole new level and giving us P2-class performance in that watt range, but this is by no means revolutionary, just evolution that allows us to do more with a ULV box.
-
1.6L is considered big? I have a 2L 4cyl Focus in Canada, and that's considered "small" by our standards. Not that I really push my car, but I am curious as to how a 1.3L accelerates [to say hwy speeds]. Because even in my car I have to really floor it [re: 5000 RPM] to hit highway speeds before I exit the ramp, well that's exaggerating a bit. usually I hit speed before the dotted lines (that let you get out of the merging lane). So I probably could accelerate at like 3-4K RPM just fine.
A 1.3L must be near redline though to go from say 40km/h to 100km/h on an onramp.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
``Via says its chip draws a minimum of 0.1 Watts, when idle, and a maximum of 1 Watt, making it a great candidate for consumer electronics devices such as UMPCs, PVRs, and such."''
Of course, in consumer electronics devices, you could just use any kind of MIPS or ARM or whatever other CPU you want, and have even lower power usage and/or better performance. It's not like you're gonna be running Windows on these devices, anyway, which is pretty much the only reason you would need an x86 in my book.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I wish people would stop encouraging the government to administer my life.
It makes me happy that someone is still catering to those who realize they don't need more CPU power and would rather, say, save money, or save the environment.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
but just what is "x" in this case? I mean, it'd be ridiculous if it was 286 of course because we'd need protected mode and 32 bit support to be even remotely relevant to today's software market. Oh, and TFA mentions it running XP, so yeah definitely at least 386 (my uni currently had a project to get XP running on a 386 and it succeeded - naturally slow as crap). But there's still a pretty decent gap between 386 and 486, 486 and 5x86 (Pentiumish level), and each subsequent iteration.
I mean, 500 MHTZ with MMX and SSE 1, 2 and 3 is vastly different from 500 MHTZ with just 386 level support. Just look at how Athlons destroyed P4's with an even similar clock speed for another example of how MHTZ aren't a definitive measure. I'd like to know more about these CPUs when it comes to performance.
Very nicely, actually. Bear in mind that these engines are in what you'd consider to be small cars; typically two- or four-door hatchbacks. I used to have a Ford Fiesta with a 1.4l engine (IIRC), and while admittedly I'm a conservative driver, I had no complaints about acceleration. (There is one hill near where I live which it didn't like going up in third, but that was about it.)
Unfortunately my old Fiesta didn't have a rev counter, but peak torque was at about roughly 4 thou IIRC; the gearboxes are calibrated so that 70mph in fifth makes the engine run near peak efficiency, which is usually a bit below peak torque. I'd accelerate from 30mph to about 60 in third gear at a little above that, and then change down to fifth once I was up to speed in the slow lane. It was definitely pushing the engine above normal town driving, but not overly so.
Did you forget to put your fraking brain in this morning certain componats require a certain level of power or they wont work or wil lfail potentialy in a dangerous way.
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
I mentioned 1.6L more as a way of showing that the scale goes up proportional with engine size. I have a 1.3L car (a Citroen C4 coupe) which has no trouble at all on Irish roads even with passengers. Naturally there are still luxury vehicles, SUVs on the roads, but the overall emphasis is generally on what Americans probably call compacts - hatchbacks, saloons and so on. Most of those are probably 1.6L or less with a lot of 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1 size engines. If you drive around in a 3L SUV in Ireland you're going to be raped by the tax man.
Or it's a diesel and produces all it's torque down low.
I have a 'tiny' 1.9L diesel and shifting at 3000 RPM I can be at 80 or 90 by time I merge and that's carrying around a fat (by european standards) Jetta. But hell, in the states my car counts as compact and I can park in those compact spots.
Oops correction, my engine is 1.4L. I should have thought more carefully before saying 1.3L. My last car was 1.3.
yeh but in the UK you just buy a classic over a certain number of years old and no tax you can get a nice starter Ferari for around 8-9k in the Uk now ;-)
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
I'm so glad you pointed that out. I shall return my A rated washing machine immediately since clearly the only way it could have gotten that rating is if the engineers dangerously interfered with the power levels required by some of its components. Idiot.
re 3l suv it would probably be a Diesel and probably running on bootleg farm fuel to boot - do irish farmers get the same deals (tax payer subsidy) the Uk ones do?
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
(I've found discussing car performance where USians can eavesdrop always leads to flaming. Still...)
In Denmark, a sizeable chunk of the total car park are small or family cars with engines in the 1.3-2.0L range. Sporty cars (Alfa Romeo et al, not Ferrari) are probably in the 2-3L range, no more. Of course the SUV-style cars will have way bigger engines (but I suspect that's more to help push the ego rather than the car).
A relevant tidbit: we pay ~7$ per gallon of petrol.
I drive a VW station wagon. It's 4 cylinders, 2L, 115bhp, ~1500kg. I don't have the stats for 0-60 (or 0-100) because I just don't drive that way, but its accelleration is quite adequate even without going over 3000rpm (usually I stay within 900-2500). I think I hit 4000rpm maybe three times a year. I average 7.3L/100km, or 32.2mpg.
My old car (Peugeot 206) had 1.4L and 75bhp to push its 975kg, and its performance was quite comparable (better low end, worse top end).
I lurk on an american classic car forum, and the rule of thumb there seems to be "(at least) 1bhp of power per 10lb og car", which translates to >300bhp for a station wagon, which again translates into race car (ok sports car) performance. I can't help wondering if that is really necessary for a family car, or a classic built for cruising.
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Did you see the Top Gear episode where Hammond bought and old Ferrari for under £10k? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_Cheap_Car_Ch allenges#Series_7.2C_Episode_4_-_The_Top_Gear_Ital ian_Mid-Engined_Supercars_For_Less_Than_A_Second-H and_Mondeo_Challenge
I wouldn't have called that nice although in fairness the other two cars were even worse.
If you overload a power suply it can overheat and cause fires for example. You have seen the damaged cause by the exploding laptop havn't you.
your trying to relate totaly diferent technologys to pc technology (well embeded systems in the case of this cpu)
its not like a car where a basic bmw 5 series functions as a car just as well as the sports modifed M5.
yeh take your A rated washing machine back hire and an eastern european woman to take you clothes down the the river it will be cheaper and much more energy efficiant.
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
'' 1.6L is considered big? I have a 2L 4cyl Focus in Canada, and that's considered "small" by our standards. Not that I really push my car, but I am curious as to how a 1.3L accelerates [to say hwy speeds]. Because even in my car I have to really floor it [re: 5000 RPM] to hit highway speeds before I exit the ramp, well that's exaggerating a bit. usually I hit speed before the dotted lines (that let you get out of the merging lane). So I probably could accelerate at like 3-4K RPM just fine. ''
Get a Diesel engine. Massive torque = massive acceleration. Not that much horse power, but that only matters at high speeds (100mph+) where you lose your driving license anyway.
In the UK, tax goes by carbon dioxide emission per km, engine size doesn't matter. There is a small number of cars that pay £35 per year, others pay between £115 and >£200 tax per year. But there are other differences: At the moment, you pay a £8 charge every time you drive into London. In the future, that will be free for cars with very low emissions, and up to £25 for very high emissions.
But the thing that really hits is company car tax. If you have a company car, you have to pay income tax on X percent of the value of the new car every year. X ranges from 15% to 35%, depending on carbon dioxide emissions. For a £20,000 car, you pay tax on £3000 to £7000, depending on emissions. At 40% tax rate, that is £1200 to £2800 tax, in other words up to £1600 punishment every year for high carbon dioxide emissions for a £20,000 car.
I cruise at 100km/h doing about 2.1K RPM or so. Heck, even at 40km/h my car is still in the 950-1K RPM range.
I can't see going from 40km/h to 100km/h without hitting at least 3K RPM, unless you're the type that merges on the highway at 20km/h under the limit (of which there are plenty around here). And I get about the same mileage as you do btw (well for highway driving).
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I don't know what deals farmers get but I do know that commercial and agricultural diesel is dyed green (in ROI) or red (in NI), to prevent the less taxed stuff from being sold and used in cars. You occasionally hear about the police conducting raids etc. I assume that since farming is a business that taxes on private motor vehicles are not necessarily applicable to SUVs used to conduct their business. I have no idea of the details though.
Fair enough. Though HP also matters when you got peeps in your car. My car can hit 100km/h from 40km/h without accelerating much harder with 4 people in the car compared to just me. Granted it takes longer, but I can still manage without going over 4K. And once I'm at speed it cruises maybe 100 RPM faster [if that].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I'd go for one of these as a co-processor on any system, let the system do its simple things on this cpu, and if it needs the speed, turn on a faster cpu, and switch it over, and then keep taking care of the simple things.
or maybe a few fast cores and this one, dedicated to the running the host OS and dedicating out the other cpu's to VM's
Does anyone know how this compares with the current one that the one laptop per child thing is using?
With the relatively low cost and high availability of computing speed nowadays, the green500 list might become very important, as it is not only the environment-friendliness but also a lot of the running cost that is involved here.
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My problem is the whole idea of using the government and tax policy to punish "bad" behavior. I would prefer to include the cost of ALL externalities into the price of the consumable and have everyone pay the same amount per unit used, that way people would be free to use however little or much as they chose and everyone would be paying there fair share. If you want to make the scheme progressive you offer a yearly refund up to a certain amount to allow for lifting up of the disadvantaged.
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The only time I do high rpms is when I'm in 5th, driving fast. Or so I think! You know, now you got me curious
Our data seem surprisingly different; I wonder if there is a difference in the petrol, gearing, tires, suspenson, or something else.
Are Canadians (generally speaking) using the soft "american-style" suspension, or the harder "continental-style" suspension?
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The decTOP is a tiny AMD Geode-based box that consumes a total of about 8 watts, doesn't have a fan, runs Linux, and the only noise is the hard drive. With a flash-based drive, the power would drop to around 5 watts, perhaps, and it'd be totally silent.
The 1 watt AMD Geode in the decTOP runs at 366 MHz and makes a fine light-duty server.
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I, too, do not agree with the GP's idea of actually taxing high-power computers, but I do think he might well have a point in just rating the computers after their power usage. If people buying computers see some real statistics of how much it is going to cost them in electricity to run their new computer, it is very likely that they are going to choose after that criterion, which will drive manufacturers to make more power-efficient computers. Which is good, because if they make computers that draw less power, then I, too, could get one of them and pay less for electricity (and having them run longer on the UPS :).
well a lot a smugeling goes on on the border of NI (used to be easy because of the troubles) and uk farmers have been known to use farm diesel in there private cars.
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
I am planning to build such a system precisely for the reasons you've mentioned - low power consumption, low noise. The problem is that I did not find any benchmarks that compare VIA's CPUs with alternatives.
Can you tell me which CPU and motherboard you are using? Is Window XP usable on that machine? (I intend to run a flavour of Linux on mine, but your feedback will be valuable anyway)
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I think Canadian cars differ very little from the american style. When I was shopping for my car I wanted a small sedan that was light on the gas. I didn't plan on entering any races, or towing an RV. The 2L Focus was the smallest I could find that was reasonably priced. It's not bad on the gas when I treat it right. Though lately, I've been accelerating a bit faster than normal to stave off th assholes [re: french quebecers] who can't be bothered to do 60km/h in a 60km/h zone.
:-)
Though justice was handed out two days ago. An unmarked car nabbed a few quebecers who were probably doing 80 or more.
I always get nasty looks for doing 60-65km/h in a 60km/h zone. Yet so far, no tickets. Tickets cost money, receiving the evil eye from impatient drivers costs nothing
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Moving back to Europe was quite a shock for me after 6 years in Australia. I had become quite used to my (perfectly normal) 3.6 litre V6 engine in my Holden Commodore. Here, that's considered quite a monster of an engine. You don't achieve "monster status" in Australia until at LEAST the 4 and half or higher litre V8 beasts.
When I moved here, I bought myself a 2.0 litre Renault Megane and I've had a couple of people ask me why I didn't buy something with a smaller engine - to me, 2.0 litres IS small! I'm sure I'll get used to it though - and the biggest thing I've found is that my little 2.0l Megane can do pretty much anything my 3.6l Commodore could do, with the exception of pushing you back in your seat when you put your foot down when you're already going over the legal speed limit in Australia. I'm pretty happy with it, and even more so when looking at the petrol prices here compared to Australia! (Australia's prices would be considered high by people in the US, but DIRT cheap by people here in Europe... I think they're comparable to Canada, but don't quote me on that)
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What if one combined such a processor with a standard Intel or AMD one, which would normally be deactivated, but be activated whenever you need high performance? That should give you the best of both worlds: Low power while doing normal, performance-insensitive stuff, and high performance when you need it. E.g. if you are a gamer, the Intel/AMD would be off while reading mail (doen't need much performance), but would be started when you start your games.
Your private affairs should be your own business but there are aspects of your life which affect the planet and people around you. Power consumption is one of them.
Slapping a tax on heavy consumers seems fair enough.
No sig today...
All these 3D fancy spinning desktops have suddenly upped the power consumption of PCs. GPUs consume as much as CPUS, and now they're running flat out for more time.
No sig today...
I find it kind of odd that this is news considering that the AMD Geode runs a 1 GHz and draws only 1 watt of power. And it, too, is x86.
And the Geode is at least a year old.
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Japan does the same thing actually. Which is why they have sports cars like the Honda S2000 which manages to somehow get 240hp out of a 2.2 liter engine.
0. Your use of punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and grammar makes me think you actually put effort into making it this crappy.
1. I point at my wrist because you aren't paying attention. You might not realize the words, but the motion is undeniable.
2. I search for the remote because while the channel may eventually be changed, the remote is still fucking missing.
3. Fuck you and your 4 pounds. Either you're part of the EU or you're not.
4. Maybe you're not waiting for a bus.
5. "Are you alright" is a simple of way of asking if you can talk, move, respond. If you don't, you're not. You probably deserved the punch anyway..
The less retarded tax would be on the electricity. Just like they tax the fuel more than the cars.
While you could hike the unit price of electric to discourage its use, you're unable to distinguish between some old age pensioner heating their house versus some guy who's playing UT3 20 hours a day on their Alienware rig. It therefore seems more transparent to put the tax on the item when its purchased rather than hike the underlying unit price.
I've been wanting to build a secondary computer that does menial backup tasks for me, such as a small box for storing my source code as a version control system. But I haven't done it yet because I didn't think having a PC-grade computer using typical PC-amounts of electricity would justify just that one use (electricity isn't free, after all, and I don't make money off my home programming projects). I'm guessing this kind of thing might make this a cost-effective reality for me?
All true, but business is run by accountants and banks, not engineers. A reasonably low power x86 opens up development of a plethora of cheap devices. You and I and anyone doing consumer homework will want an ARM based device for the better power performance, but the average consumer is only concerned with the price in Best Buy's and Walmart's weekend flyer. The ratio of x86 programmers to competent ARM developers must be enormous; so must the development tools. This would reduce development costs significantly and allow smaller players into portable device markets. I think they may not have a top mobile technology product, but Via has a winning marketing product.
When I start building embedded I used the Zilog Z80. It was not the best performance choice but it was very cheap and that's what the customer cared about.
> Some people want to buy a car that performs well. (I'm not talking about SUVs or huge waste hogs)
Hmmm, there are some things that a Hummer H2 does much better than anything produced by Ferrari. So when you say 'performs well' it all depends on what you mean by 'perform'. Taking along five passengers while pulling a trailer with six horses in it would be ugly in your Ferrari, regardless of the symbol on the emblem.
I will admit that most big trucks are used for image rather than actual work, but the same is true for most high performance sport cars. My four cylinder sedan (no turbo) will pull in excess of 110 MPH easily, yet I seldom get to drive that fast. Most of the time I am stuck in a steam of traffic going 75, and the Corvettes and BMW M5s around me are going no faster. They do, however, look much more hip and important. I guess that is worth the extra fuel consumption.
Right... so you can't tell the difference between some 80 year old heating their house to survive the winter as opposed to some disposable income guy playing with his new dual SLI rig.
That sounds more retarded, not less.
6502 -> 65816
originally Jef Raskin's Mac was going to be more like an Apple IIgs (which was developed and came out after the Mac did)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Everyone keeps saying how great this chip will be for laptops. You won't be seeing it in laptops. People want multi-GHz multi-core laptops that can run Vista.
You will see them in PDA-like devices, industrial portable computers(like inventory systems, medical systems), home routers/appliances, and possibly smartphones.
Why have a 1Watt cpu in a laptop that can give it a 14 hour battery life, when it's not powerful enough to do full screen playback of mpeg4/dvix/xvid?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The problem with that is that the external costs cannot be calculated at a fixed rate per unit. What do you do if there is a geometric relationship between environmental damage (an external cost) and total power consumed? Or how about factoring in the cost of reducing the world's fossil fuel supply? As each unit is consumed, should the increase in price to the rest of the supply be counted as an external cost?
What I would propose is a stepped price scale based on each purchaser's usage for the billing period, with credits for certain necessary high-power appliances (such as certain medical equipment needed for long-term home care).
Of course, this tax would need to be put into the coffers of government for remediation and offset of those external costs, which has its own problems.
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Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
And sell me a motherboard with 64 CPU sockets. ;-)
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What is the theoretically minimum power consumption for physical computers?
What's even the unit to measure it? "Joules per bit"? Bits of what? What's the theoretically least power consuming computation? Is it a bitwise comparison like "not equals", or NAND? Maybe something more primitive, like a half adder?
And what's the lowest power consuming physical device, made of molecules (not, say, electrons or quarks) that can compute that minimum unit?
And with that standard established, how "infodynamically" efficient is a 1-W 500MHz Pentium/MMX/SSE2?
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We are actually trying to build portable, solar-powered/gel battery systems. We've been experimenting with the AMD LX800 (rated @ 0.9W) and are very impressed so far. Our results show that it idles at about 800mA and briefly jumps to 1800mA during processor peaks. Our field application also uses touchscreen LCD's which adds another 800-900mA to the equation. Add a thermal printer 400mA idle and a cellular modem @ 200mA idle.
0.1W is nice, but adding a 3.5W northbridge/southbridge makes the complete package worse than the Geode. Considering the LX800 "Companion Chipset" brings the total package to 2.4W, and the Geode includes MMX and SSE instructions the Geode more bang for the power buck.
One watt should be enough for ANYBODY!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
What I want for a home server is
:), with four drives it should be possible to form an asymmetric raid. Periodically, the smallest disk would be replaced with a larger disk, rather than a need for matched drives.
1) "low spin drives". Rather than stopping entirely, they would keep up a modest rotation (60rpm?) so that when spun up, they don't have to start with he resultant wear.
2) Asymmetric RAID. While I haven't done the math (maybe I should do it and publish it, but then someone would expect the algorithm from me, too
hawk
FUCK! It needs a 3.5 W Companion Chip so FUCK THAT. 1+3.5= 5 WATTS then DRAM sucks a WHOLE LOT. Nothing to see here. Move right along geeks!
Sounds like you're describing a TS-7400 from Technologic Systems - although the 7400 is ARM9 based. They ship a version with built-in wireless in a case about the size of a deck of playing cards. You can get Debian on a 512MB SD card for the system.
"If we're going to have a backlit screen anyway (even with LEDs), we can only gain so much by reducing the CPU consumption. Amdahl's law and all that."
Amdahl's law relates parallelism to MP -- it has nothing to do with power consumption. Amdahl's law is why only embarrassingly parallel software will gain much from a quad core (or octo-core) setup, unless you're running a system multiple people access concurrently.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I wonder if part of the reason for larger engines in vehicles in the US and Canada is the proliferation of automatic transmissions as opposed to Europe where the majority of vehicles have manual transmissions. I've found a manual transmission to be vastly superior when driving a vehicle that's a little on the under-powered side because you can downshift when you need the extra power instead of tromping on the accelerator and waiting a few seconds for an automatic to downshift for you. As a result I think my perception of the vehicle is vastly improved over the same vehicle with an automatic.
Electric heating is, if anything, more wasteful of energy than a crazy gaming rig. Are we trying to discourage wasting electricity here, or to punish people for recreational usage?
If we can convince that pensioner to switch over to gas heating we save quite a bit more energy than we do if the gamer buys an Alienware with only one GeForce 8800 GTX instead of two.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Do you have a CVT or something? Otherwise your comment doesn't make sense. In a conventional transmission, you will generally have the same RPM-to-MPH ratio for any speed in a specific gear, no matter how many people are weighing down your car.
Here's a much better plan: First, remove non-renewable energy subsidies. That, by itself, would have more of a beneficial effect on the environmental effects of power consumption than any five "overconsumption" taxes.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Exactly! We need to discourage pensioners from spending all that extra energy on heat, when they have perfectly good gas furnaces just sitting in the attic, waiting to replace the electric heat they installed just to be wasteful! ;-)
No, seriously. We either want to discourage wasting electricity or we don't. If we do, then people with electric heating systems should be one of our first targets. Maybe we would want to use some of the money raised from this electricity tax to assist people in upgrading their heating systems (and insulation), but saying "we should introduce a tax to reduce electricity usage, but let's start by exempting the largest users" is absurd.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
It really pisses me off to read about childish nerd with his toy car (SUV) which is dangerous for both pedestrians and environment. Then I feel some kind of jealousy about the low tax the childish American pays for his fuel. Then I'm reminded how well that works here in Europe and btw here in the Netherlands cars which are bad for the environment are going to pay substantially more regarding road-tax while the opposite is true for environment-friendly cars. The fuel itself ofcourse, costs still approx the same.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Meaningless off-topic anecdote regarding USB:
I've had bad luck with every single VIA-based add-on USB controller card that I have attempted to use. Strange things, like only negotiating at USB 2.0 speeds -if- the machine is booted with the USB 2.0 device attached. Random hard lockups (not even a BSOD) under moderate (2.5" HDD speeds) data transfer in multiple, otherwise rock-solid Proliant machines under Win2k3.
In all cases, it seems that it's something that a driver update would fix. But also in all cases so far, no update has existed.
I've had much better results with randomly-selected NEC-based controllers, which so far have always just worked in every machine I've tried.
Kid-proof tablet..
echo "$PARENT" | sed 's/RISC/Republican/g' | sed 's/CISC/Democrat/g'
and you just described politics in the US for the last decade or two....
Yes and no. The problem is that the US needs the capability to mobilize for war, which requires both a large reserve of fossil fuels and a huge metaphorical pipeline for fuel on demand. This is what drives the subsidization, to ensure that the US's wehrmacht capability is there.
Until the military runs on fuels other than fossil, the subsidies aren't going away. Equivalent subsidies for renewable/less-polluting energy resources would be more to my liking.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You'd need a beowulf cluster of such tiny engines to power the typical US SUV.
...
I'm imagineing at least 4 of these under the hood of a Yukon Denali
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
I doubt an SUV would be a tight ride. Irish roads are not especially narrow in general and have to accommodate coaches, trucks etc. But it's just really quite pointless to be driving an SUV unless you absolutely have to since the taxes and fuel costs make it prohibitive and rather pointless. It's not even obvious to me why SUVs are popular in the US. They're not more spacious or safer than other vehicles so it's a puzzle why people would choose them over conventional vehicles. Perhaps they're perceived as safer even though they're very easy to tip over.
The Geode NX has SSE. It's really an Athlon. It eats power too.
The Geode GX and Geode LX do not have SSE. They are derived from the Cyrix MediaGX. (which passed through National Semiconductor before AMD bought it) They have MMX, 3dNow!, and a vector sqrt() function.
I guess that brings up the question of how much it's worth warping the economy to speed up our preparation for all-out war mobilization against China (since there is no other potential enemy that would require a full-scale mobilization like that). Personally, I think we'd have enough warning that would have time to ramp up supply lines and such in a war like that - and the military could easily increase their petrol stockpile to take up the slack during a ramp up period.
But that's even accepting the premise that it's potentially worth seriously warping the entire world energy market and causing untold economic damage everywhere just to marginally decrease the USA's preparation effort for a major war. That definitely doesn't seem like the sort of trade off a democratic society (or any society that made rational decisions to maximize its own wellbeing) would intentionally make.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Speed is not just RPM x (gear ratio) x (wheel size)
The difference with just passenger weight is usually pretty small (barring super-fatties), but if you really pay attention you'll notice it too. Especially if you're paying for gasoline.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Interesting. It kinda reminds me a bit of the original idea being the 'Commodore One' project (which has since moved to an FPGA design which loads hardware/OS personalities, as I understand it). Too bad the //x didn't happen. I doubt it would have given the Amiga much competition technically (though I'm sure Apple could've competed very well via marketing), due to the lack of all the special co-processors the Amiga used, plus the very advanced (for its time) OS, but it sure sounds like it would've blown away the //gs.
Yup, now I've looked at my rpms under accelleration. Relatively lively accelleration on a highway on-ramp takes me to about 3k rpm in 3rd and 4th, but nowhere near 4k. In 4th gear, 4k rpm equals 110km/h which is the speed limit. In 5th, it's more than 140 (don't know how much because that would not just be a ticket more, but a license less...).
Must be different gear ratios. Otherwise I don't get our different observations.
"Good news, everyone!"