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Comparing Performance and Power Use For Vista vs. Windows 7 WIth Clarksfield Chi
crazipper writes "Back when Intel launched its Core i5/i7 'Lynnfield' CPUs, Tom's Hardware ran some tests in Windows 7 versus Vista to gauge the benefits of the core parking and ideal core optimizations, said to cut power consumption in the new OS. It turned out that Win7 shifted the Nehalem-based CPUs in and out of Turbo Boost mode faster, resulting in higher power draw under load, while idle power was a slight bit lower. The mobile version of the architecture was claimed (at the time) to show a greater improvement in moving to Win7. Today there's a follow-up with the flagship Clarksfield processor that shows the same aggressive P-state promotion policies giving Win7 a significant performance advantage with Core i7 Mobile. However, power consumption is higher as well."
Isn't this what we want? I mean, it's higher power under load because it switches to "fast mode" faster. Isn't that good? Yes it uses more power, but if the goal was to use as little power as possible, we'd just lock the processor in "slow mode".
I haven't seen a desktop in a long time that had ECC RAM, or even support for it.
Any moderately recent AMD CPU will support ECC, and it's not hard to find a mainboard that does as well (for example I believe any ASUS mainboard for AMD will support ECC, I know the one I checked a couple days ago does (cheapest ASUS AM3 mainboard on Newegg then, probably still is, only like $5 more than the cheapest other AM3 board)).
In the Core 2 era of chips desktop use normal unbuffered DDR2 or DDR3 DIMMs.
Buffered/unbuffered is separate from ECC/non-ECC. For example I know the AMD desktop chips support unbuffered ECC memory.
Desktop stuff is not ECC because it is cheaper.
Maybe 10% cheaper. And of course it's easy to make things cheaper if they don't have to work correctly.
I cant be the only one who might think xp sp3 might actually win
while under battery power the CPU will do everything it can to conserve power under the same software load conditions.
In many notebooks, the CPU does not dominate battery consumption; the northbridge, southbridge, and LCD backlight draw a significant fraction of the power. So when CPU usage hits 90%, clocking it up to full power is warranted because it gets the work done faster, meaning that the chipset and LCD don't run as long while the user is waiting for the CPU to finish.
Riiight.
Certainly Intel and Microsoft work closely together, they have many reasons to. But I've used many AMD and Intel systems, and honestly they're pretty interchangeable in terms of user experience.
Claims that Windows only runs right with Intel is at best, inaccurate. Are you forgetting things like the adoption of the AMD64 architecture as The Way Forward for Microsoft in terms of 64bit support, over Intel's offerings..