I replaced two 60W incandescents in my computer room with two 23W "100W equivalent" CFLs. I expected to save a lot of power while increasing the light output from 120W to 200W equivalent. Instead I find that the lighting is dim and creates a depressing environment in the room. I couldn't conceive of replacing all the bulbs throughout my house.
This leads me to believe the energy equivalence is a bunch of hype at best, and outright dishonesty at worst, and that efforts to outlaw incandescents are severely misguided and premature. Switching to CFL represents a quality of life reduction. I'm hoping LEDs ultimately turn out to be a better solution.
Relatively few programmers are going to take the time to split programs and algorithms into cooperative multithreaded tasks. Supercomputer-type numeric applications would clearly benefit but that is boring.
A much bigger win would be to run instructions from multiple *processes* simultanously. Think of all the background processes that are running and of things like 'gmake -J'. The O/S would manage it transparently and all programs would benefit.
In terms of wasted I-fetch bandwidth and wasted I-cache space, IA64 will always be inferior to IA32 by a sizable constant factor. IA64 squanders resources by being RISC, averaging 43 bits per instruction, and requiring a high percentage of NOPs.
IA32 code is becoming an abstract, "portable," semi-compressed byte code interpreted by various proprietary cores at speeds upwards of 3GHz.
IA64 has such room for obscure corner cases that other vendors couldn't make a compatible chip even if they got around patent issues. It's just so complex and dirty.
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I replaced two 60W incandescents in my computer room with two 23W "100W equivalent" CFLs. I expected to save a lot of power while increasing the light output from 120W to 200W equivalent. Instead I find that the lighting is dim and creates a depressing environment in the room. I couldn't conceive of replacing all the bulbs throughout my house. This leads me to believe the energy equivalence is a bunch of hype at best, and outright dishonesty at worst, and that efforts to outlaw incandescents are severely misguided and premature. Switching to CFL represents a quality of life reduction. I'm hoping LEDs ultimately turn out to be a better solution.
Yeah, but try to get one by Christmas now...
Relatively few programmers are going to take the time to split programs and algorithms into cooperative multithreaded tasks. Supercomputer-type numeric applications would clearly benefit but that is boring.
A much bigger win would be to run instructions from multiple *processes* simultanously. Think of all the background processes that are running and of things like 'gmake -J'. The O/S would manage it transparently and all programs would benefit.
Curt
IA32 code is becoming an abstract, "portable," semi-compressed byte code interpreted by various proprietary cores at speeds upwards of 3GHz.
IA64 has such room for obscure corner cases that other vendors couldn't make a compatible chip even if they got around patent issues. It's just so complex and dirty.
Curt