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Most Game Console Power Draw Comes From Time Spent Idling
hypnosec writes "Springer Science and Business Media has discovered that during 2010, almost 70 per cent of the overall power draw of the world's consoles was thanks to idling. This total came to over 10.8 TWh of energy, equating to well over a billion dollars in wasted power. The biggest culprit for the trio of main consoles of this generation was the PlayStation 3, with its first edition having an active power draw of 180 watts and an idling draw of 167. As the report states, the Xbox 360 wasn't much better however, with active/idle draws of 172/162w respectively. Both of those consoles have got far better with their hardware revisions, more than halving the idle power consumption, but the Wii has been ahead of the curve the whole time. Its active/idle power draws were as low as 16/11w. The only real difference with the Nintendo console was whether its WC24 was enabled or not. With it on, standby power jumped from 2w to 9w."
A locked-down hardware and (for the most part) software specification that developers can optimize too. Consoles are older hardware that is much better utilized.
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How much would you have to spend today on a PC that's equivalent to, say, an XBox 360? How much does the XBox cost?
There's probably more to it than cost, but last time I checked PCs weren't sold as loss-leaders.
That's an interesting question, bcause the XBox's processor is not directly equivalent to a PC processor. Because it's an in-order execution system, it doesn't really compare well to PC processors jusrt by looking at its specs. It may be a 3-core 2-instruction capable processor, but in reality most code likely only fills one of the instruction slots at a time (similarly to the original Pentium). Whereas modern PC processors tend to be able to handle 2 or even 3 instructions per cycle a lot of the time. So it may be best to think of it as being similar to a modern CPU with about half the clock speed. Although there are still significant differences. A quick review of old documents on it suggests a 21-stage pipeline, which is longer than current-generation PC processors, and means mispredicted branches are going to be slower comparitivlely. It also has a much smaller cache than modern PC processors, and it's 21.6GB/s memory bandwidth is comparable to the very low end of current desktop processors. All-in-all, thererfore, I'd expect any modern dual-core budget processor (e.g. a Celeron G530) to outperrform it in most tasks.
The onboard graphics on a Celeron G530 processor is considered comparable in capability to ATI cards from 3 generations later than the ones that are most similar architecturally to the XBox 360's graphics chip, so this basic PC should substantially outperform the XBox 360 in graphics performance.
So, processor: £36.24 (dabs.com). Add to that processor a budget microATX motherboard (£34.99), 2GB RAM (4 times as much as is in the XBox 360, but the smallest amount available these days) (£11.97), case & PSU (£19.99), hard disk (£34.99) and optical drive (£11.99), and the total is *very* similar to the cost of an Xbox 360 (about £1 more expensive than the cheapest deal I see for a new 360 on google shopping). For a machine that outclasses the 360 in most respects (perhaps even all respects... it is very hard to compare the CPU performance).