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Intel Releases Several Projects to Help Save Power
GeekyBodhi writes "LessWatts.org is Intel's new website that hosts several power saving tools. As Linux.com reports, it also shares tips and tricks to help optimize power consumption on hardware from portable devices running on batteries to large data centers. 'LessWatts.org is not about marketing, trying to sell you something or comparing one vendor to another. LessWatts.org is about how you can save real watts, however you use Linux on your computer or computers.' As reported on Slashdot earlier, this isn't the first time Intel has tried to help Linux users cut their power bills. In May, the company launched the PowerTOP program that monitors individual processes to keep track of power consumption. The project comes at a time when more vendors are pre-installing Linux on handhelds and laptops." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
intel is also putting some effort into lower power x86 chips to compete with ARM in bulky handheld internet devices. As if ruining the desktop wasn't good enough :/
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
LessPower.org was taken... so they settled on LessWatts.org?
Actually, they registered FewerWatts.org, too... and pointed it at LessWatts.org!
Surely someone involved in this project took a grammar class, and could point out that it should be the other way around.
Shouldn't it be fewer Watts? Less Watts would mean less of Mr. Watts. Gee, at lest get the grammar right! They could say less wattage.
The game.
It looks to me like it's just a relaunched version of Intel Powertop with better marketing behind it.
Regardless, Powertop actually is a useful tool, and it's helped me get much better battery life out of my T61 running Ubuntu.
eclecti.cc
Don't switch it on !
It would be interesting to compare the actual power usage between two sets of IDENTICAL test systems, one set running Linux and the Intel Optimizations described in the site, and the second set running the equivalent commercial MICROSOFT software (Server 2003, Vista, XP, etc..) running equivalent real-world workloads.... (And I suppose some sort of Linux Anti-Virus software would need to be procured and added to the Linux test systems to make it fair...)
I'd read cheap power supplies can waste upwards of 4/5 the energy converted to DC. Fixing that is way more savings than any OS or PC tweaking. An effort by Google (pdf warning) was mentioned on Slashdot a while ago.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
LessWatts.org is about how you can save real watts
Real watts? You mean as opposed to imaginary watts?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Shove an AC current into an RC circuit tht is resonant. Then you have
lots of Imaginary watts!
Cleara
Your right. Who cares if its grammatically correct? Besides, they *did* register FewerWatts, to.
Any "PowerTaskManager" or something :(?
Please?
am I mistaken or are they saying the program will tell me how much power it saved me? I think I would like to get a physical monitor that I can plug my computer into to record my power usage and determine like that before I trust what it tells me its done. I have 2 always on servers at my house that I would be very interested in using this on but I'll be testing it on another computer first.
I am also wondering... isn't the tickless idle a standard thing on the newest kernels? so then aside from cutting down on random programs polling to see if there is work to do, temporarily disabling hardware is all thats left for someone to do to save power?
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
...and this comes from company that kept Pentium 4 5+ years on market? Then they didn't care for how much power that monster consume and how little it gives in return. The pwoer of marketing, theme is just different, it is not GHz, it is greenHz.
If they'd bothered running the site name past someone passingly familiar with the rules of English before going live, it'd be called FewerWatts. sigh.
No, they aren't all imaginary Watts. Power factor current will cause wasted power by resistive loss in associated wiring through which it flows. High power factor does cause wasted power.
on modern Intel CPUs, the overwhelming majority are used to compensate for the fact that the CPU is ridiculously faster than the memory to which it interfaces. IOW, the cache. These CPUs consume between 80 and 120 watts of power. The reduced power versions use only 50.
By way of comparison, the 1 GHz AMD Geode runs on about 1 watt of power, and ARM processors can get by for even less.
By way of further comparison, a register to register transfer can be completed in 1/2 clock cycle. Contrast this with a read-modify-write memory cycle where a word is fetched from one memory location, modified, and written to a distant location, which will take 4 memory cycles (which typically runs at 1/2 or less of the clock speed of the CPU).
The power consumption problem is due more to the fact that compensating for this difference in speed requires a large SRAM cache on the die. And even then, it's not perfect - if you do things which routinely involve cache misses (such as video encoding, etc...) the CPU is stuck operating at the effective speed of the memory bus.
The key to reducing CPU power consumption is to use lower-latency memories, which require smaller on-die caches for a given performance level. We could double the throughput of DDR SDRAM by simply demultiplexing the address and data busses, similar to the way SRAM functions. There's no requirement in the underlying storage structure of DRAM to require separate row and column addresses; it's just a historical artifact. Originally, before DRAM and SDRAM became popular, computers were built with SRAM because its lower latency allowed even slow CPUs to work efficiently. But DRAM promised lower cost (via fewer bus lines) and lower power consumption (bits stored in charged capacitors, rather than cross-coupled transistors), at the price of latency, and the rest, unfortunately, is history.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite v2.5
Another thing to consider when buying a power supply is to be sure to get one that is 80+ certified, which means it has more than 80% energy efficiency, ie wastes 20% or less electric energy as heat, thus reducing electricity waste and bills.
The 80 PLUS Program
Intel can do whatever they want and it won't have even remotely close to the same effect as if Microsoft simply made the default windows power setting for PCs to go to sleep mode after 30 minutes of real, actual no use (as in not turn off while video endcoding or running p2p programs or virus scanning etc). You know how many people don't do anything to their computer overnight or when they're not home or whatever? Yeah it would piss people off a little but half their features do anyway. I think if they did that it would save like 5% of all US power.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Besides to save power, Linux can be used to make computers less harmful to our environment and to solve some ecological issues. The Linux-Ecology-HOWTO explains how to use Linux to save power and consumables like paper and ink. Since it does not require big hardware, Linux may be used with old computers to make their life cycle longer. Games may be used in environmental education and software is available to simulate ecological processes.
Check the comments in [http://lwn.net/Articles/250786] yesterday's lwn.net story, however, in the summary they too give the wrong impression of sponsorship.
The site is subscriber only, so here is one of the comments making it clear that this is not an Intel only site:
"Posted Sep 21, 2007 4:04 UTC (Fri) by subscriber arjan (#36785) [Link]
The site is by absolutely no means limited to Intel.
If you have suggestions etc for other systems by all means contribute and I'll add them personally to the website [*]
[*] this assumes they're serious suggestions, and not something like "put 500 Volts over your cpu" [removed smilely]"
Many of the same points were made, with less echo effect there. I would have hoped for more clarity.
I wonder what the base power consumption is for a MacBook Pro running OSX. One would think it *could* be very low, considering the control Apple had over their own hardware. Anyone know how to find out?
High power factor does cause wasted power.
You've got that the wrong way 'round, the opposite is true: it's low PF that wastes power.
PF = (real power) / (apparent power, ie. VA) --- ie. always between 0.0 and 1.0
When the Power Factor is low because the VA is higher than the real power, then the current is higher than necessary and results in extra resistive losses. So, it's low PF that wastes power.
That alone will save a lot of power in a system.
Imaginary as in square root of -1, not imaginary as in non-existent. Google 'phasor diagram'.
On the subject of power savings, I tried enabling the on-demand frequency governor when I last upgraded my system. Turned out that enabling AMD's PowerNow feature in the BIOS, which enabled the on-demand governor to work, caused my VMware virtual machine to randomly hang and/or stop its clock. So I had to turn it off.
I'm willing to try some of the other power-saving suggestions, but only as long as they don't cause problems in any of the applications I use.
Here's a tip for AMD users:
You can reduce the power used on an AMD CPU by having it ramp the clock down when the OS is in an idle loop.
To find out the current setting, you can use lspci.
lspci -xxxs 00:18.3 | awk '($1 == "80:") {print $9}'
This number will tell you what divisor the CPU is running at.. 0 is no clock ramping, and 61 is the maximum value.
to set this:
setpci -s 00:18.3 87.b=61
If you have a second CPU socket (single/dual/quad core doesn't matter) you will have to also adjust 00:19.3. This may cause drift in the TSC between the two sockets tho.. but not many applications will care about this.
This advice is dangerous, as it does not explain what is going on in reality, with links to AMD docs explaining it (what register are you changing? does it apply to all revisions?). I followed this kind of advice for old Athlon K75 and XP cpus, only after reading the AMD PDFs a couple of times and making sure I was changing the right bits. Then I found out athcool utility, and after reading the source and make sure it was the equivalent than setpci I moved to it, it is cleaner (detects exact chipset so it works in different machines without changing the invokation, can check current status, etc).
Now you just use CoolNQuiet tech (or whatever the name, Intel equivalent is Speedstep, AMD named it Powernow for older versions) via kernel features and modules, specially with ondemand governor (great thing with a Centrino and its Speedstep). Do not mess with custom rc.local things when you can get it from distro or kernel, with more tested tools.
Power supplies are more efficient at lower temperatures (around 25C), so don't send the heat from your processor to the PS as most people do using a horizontal cooler over the heat sink.
Instead use a heat sink that have a vertical cooler like Zalman CNPS9500
I am disappointed at the pessimism that is being displayed over Intels discoveries. Really, instead of commenting positively about an initiative that would reduce burning coal in Ohio, or oil in the Midwest power plants, you guys look at criticizing a company that did not write the software, but discovered that through some changes, power could be reduced. All I can say to the critics is: SHAME SHAME SHAME.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada