Any modern CPU is fast enough for me these days, and I don't need a real big screen on a laptop. What I want is good, solid construction, and long battery life. How much of a laptop's power use is due to the hard drive? And how much of that is saved by using a flash-based disk?
Speaking of which, can someone show me how power consumption is divided among the parts of a laptop (CPU, chipset, wireless, drives, graphics card if applicable, LCD, backlight, etc)?
I live in Houston, where every building is air-conditioned to somewhere in the 68-70F region during the summer. Everyone thinks it's too cold, but by some Divine Decree, that's the temperature indoors. At home, we have our thermostat set at 78 during the summer. Assuming an average (over a 24-hour period) temperature of 88 degrees, that means we're saving roughly half of our A/C costs by using 78 instead of 68 or 70F. As temperatures fall, that number increases dramatically.
What really hit me was when we took a trip to Utah in October. Outside temperature: about 40F. Inside temperature: close to 80F. If they set the temperature down to 68F, they would save some 25% of their heating costs.
So Houston is colder in the summer than Utah is in the winter. Go figure.
Up until now, there have been a grand total of ZERO reasons for me to be interested in Vista. None of the new features hold any draw for me. It's good to see that there's finally something worthwhile in it--traffic shaping at the machine level is a good thing.
That's interesting--anandtech's review of the Core 2 Duos indicated that power consumption was really about the same across the board. The AMD EE chips were the least-power hungry, with just about every other chip all in a small span. Methinks someone's test procedures aren't quite accurate--not quite sure which ones, though.
One minor correction--the memory controller does not increase memory bandwidth per se, but it does significantly reduce latency, as well as the complexity and power consumption of the Northbridge.
AMD has consistently been a step behind Intel in the die-shrinking competition. The fact that AMD's chips run as cool as or cooler than their equal-performing Intel counterparts even at the larger process is a credit to good engineering.
Of course, since Intel will also be moving forward over the next 18 months, they might end up still in the lead. Making a huge turnaround like they did (from Netburst to Core) in such a short time is remarkable. Creating an architecture and setting up the process and designing a generation of chips takes a looooong time. Kudos to Intel for that. Now the ball is in AMD's court, and they have to respond.
At the high end, of course, Intel rules. What about processors that normal people buy?
I was recently looking at a Core2Duo review, and noticed something interesting. At each brand's bottom end (E6300 vs. X2 3800), Intel outperformed AMD. The problem in my mind, however, is that Intel's bottom-end starts at a higher price point than AMD's. Very smart marketing move by Intel. However, If you match the processors price-to-price, the E6300 matches up against the X2 4200 (both currently around $180), and there is relatively little performance difference. In other words, the price/performance metric really isn't in anyone's favor.
Another smart (but a little slimy) marketing move Intel has made is in the power dissipation numbers. AMD quotes their CPU's maximum dissipation, and Intel quotes a power figure for some arbitrary (under 100%) CPU load. Intel looks good here....until you actually measure a system's power draw at the outlet, and find that again, there's not that much difference. This may (and probably will) drastically change as AMD's 65nm parts get out, but we'll have to wait and see.
I work for a large energy company (you'd definitely know the name, and probably hate us)
We just rolled out WinXP last year (2005) as a replacement for NT4. That's...what, four years after WinXP came out? So I'd expect our company to move to Vista sometime in 2010 or 2011.
QUERTY was originally designed not to increase typing efficiency--in fact, the opposite is true. Typists were getting so fast with ABCDE layouts that the keys were jamming. QUERTY was designed in part to slow typists down.
The article should have called it "Dvorakesque" instead.
You make a very good point. I don't own a console of any sort (blasphemy, I know), and I've only once played Halo with four players on one TV, but it was pretty tough for my used-to-higher-resolution eyes to see much.
And since the Wii seems to be the only "next-gen" console that natively supports four players on one console, that extra resolution would come in handy.
It would be interesting to know how much of the video game market consists of people with HDTVs that actually do 720p/1080whatever. This also leads me to ask: "Does resolution really matter?" For some games, I'm sure it makes a difference, but I'd be willing to bet that high resolution won't make any difference to a large majority of gamers in a large number of titles.
Keeping to 480p seems like a good move by Nintendo. Many (I'd even go so far as to say most) of their games will be just as fun, you don't need a fancy TV just to enjoy it, and (perhaps most importantly) it keeps part cost, size, and power requirements down.
I was watching my teenage brother-in-law play Zelda (I don't recall which) on his gamecube the other day. The graphical style of the game was very effective, and I think it would actually lose appeal going to higher resolution.
Now all you experts can respond and tell me why I'm totally wrong.
Re:The never ending march ...
on
School Bans 'Tag'
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I believe you mean a Nation of Wimps. Definitely a good read.
While it is true that latency is worse with DDR2 than with DDR, AMD still has the latency advantage over Intel because of their on-board memory controller. Yes, AMD's latency is worse now than it was with DDR, but it's still better than Intel.
Besides, it all comes down to performance, and I don't see anybody complaining about the performance of DDR2.
Yup, it looks like the GPL is now (officially) legally binding in Germany. This says nothing about the EULAs that come with proprietary software. Those are different licenses with different terms, and would have to be tested individually.
I can't argue about the novelty of being able to "produce a nine million digit prime number by memorizing eight digits", but I'll take issue with your comment about the patent portfolio. Stanford have stated that they'll make the results available to everyone.
I run Folding@Home since my computers are on 24/7 anyway--and if it leads to a cure for cancer/leukemia/Hodgekins'/alsheimer's/whatever-ot her-cancer-related-disease, I won't mind if someone makes money off producing the cure.
My concerns echo yours. Some venues are perfect for in-game ads, but some are about the worst place you could find them. I don't have a problem with in-game ads per se--it's a valid way for a game producer/distributor to increase revenue. But if it doesn't fit the game, forget it.
Take BF 2142, for instance. I don't think that a pristine Pepsi ad would do much for the immersion/realism of the game, and I have a hard time believing that the advertisers would be enthusiastic about giving players the ability to destroy/tag/mark the ad. A clean billboard in the middle of a war zone would be an eyesore (to put it lightly), and the potential for in-game grafitti (be it a tag, a mark left from an explosion, or whatever) is great.
Yes, the old Laserjets were practically indestructible. My parents bought a Laserjet 4p with their first PC (a Packard Bell with a Pentium 90) back in....I think it was 94. That printer, with it's four-whopping-pages-per-minute, is still going strong, twelve years later. And my parents print more than your average user.
Exactly. Create limited user accounts, and only let them use those. Many (poorly-written) pieces of software claim that administrator privileges are necessary, but there are (almost) always F/OSS equivalents that don't have such a ridiculous requirement.
Here's a question for you, and all the other know-it-alls out there:
Why would Microsoft care about the next spike in computer sales? Why do they care whether it's Windows XP or Vista on those computers? They get paid one way or the other. Why bother writing Vista in the first place?
From my limited perspective, it seems the only reason to do a full rewrite now (an enormous investment) is so that you can either 1) gain marketshare and therefore revenue now, or 2) reduce the maintenance and support costs in the future by improving the architecture & design of the software. Option 1 doesn't seem very logical, considering the near-monopoly that Windows currently enjoys. So option 2.
But wait a minute--haven't we heard all sorts of complaints about the complexity of Windows, all the dependencies, etc? I would venture to guess that there is some value in having newly-written code that more cleanly does everything the old-and-patched code does, but does that kind of development work require the amount of investment Microsoft has made?
It's interesting that the concept of having more than two people in a game has not penetrated into sports games yet. Many other genres have long since adopted this kind of play, even on consoles, which were long constrained by lack of networking ability. First-person shooters? Yup. Role-playing games? Yup, to a dazzling extent. Real-time strategy? Not really, but the nature of the game inherently limits the number of players.
The one genre where teamwork should seem obvious lacks any sort of teamwork gameplay for more than two players. I wonder why it took an NFL player to bring it to the EA execs' minds.
Then again, when you have what amounts to a monopoly in sports games, there's little motivation to innovate. We certainly haven't seen EA do much in that area...
About four months ago, I switched my dad from Netscape 7.2 to Thunderbird and Firefox, after his email got somehow deleted on multiple occasions (email files simply went from giant-sized to empty with no other symptoms). Yesterday he called me for help--now, all the email from March to the present had disappeared. A few VNC-hoop-jumps later, I found the problem:
He had mistakenly opened Netscape, which had been resting peacefully since March. He was much relieved when we opened Thunderbird and all his email was still there.
The initial cost of the NAS drive is about $180 (Buffalo Linkstation, 250GB, FTP and SMB file serving, as well as a print server). That means over two years to recoup the initial investment, and by that time, it may be time for a replacement anyway.
Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation
Actually, that's not as true as we would like it to be. I have an acquaintance who recently has been considering replacing his file server with a standalone, single-drive NAS. In order to justify the expense to his wife, he bought a Kill-A-Watt and measured the power his current file server was using. It was using 100W, vs. the 12W of the NAS. That's a difference of 88W. However, at our current electricity rates, that amounts to a whopping $8/month savings.
Considering that your hard drive is only consuming a few (as in, 10) watts, replacing it with a notebook drive won't save you any significant amount of money, even over the VERY long term. The advantages for notebook drives come, as others have said, in their small size and lower power consumption for notebooks.
Microsoft has been experiencing for several years what Google is only now realizing: They're good at a few things, and that's it. Microsoft, feeling the pinch of having essentially only two major products (Windows and Office), wanted to diversify. While they have a near-monopoly on operating systems and office suites, that's the only market in which they have a large, profitable stake. So they try to branch out. Sometimes, they're more successful, like with their mouses. Sometimes, they're not, if you look at the financials of the Xbox. The problem they face, however, is that the markets they want to branch into are already well established. Crowded, even. So MS throws piles of money at it, hoping that it will work. At the same time, Apple and Linux are starting to make inroads in the desktop and server markets. MS sees their mainstay threatened.
Google is similar. They came up with a great product, their search engine. It was so good that it rapidly took a majority of the market, despite default IE settings. But then they stalled. GMail is good, but has nowhere near the market penetration as their search. Maps, groups, IM, blogs, calendar, spreadsheets...the list goes on. Google has some good products, but they're trying to expand into an already saturated market. And now their flagship product is faltering. Linkfarms, SEOs illegitimately boosting their rankings, and spammers are degrading the quality of Google's results.
Now, we're not talking about a mature industry with human-interactive robots. However, this smells strongly of "We need to find a new way to make money if Windows/Office starts slipping"
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Any modern CPU is fast enough for me these days, and I don't need a real big screen on a laptop. What I want is good, solid construction, and long battery life. How much of a laptop's power use is due to the hard drive? And how much of that is saved by using a flash-based disk?
Speaking of which, can someone show me how power consumption is divided among the parts of a laptop (CPU, chipset, wireless, drives, graphics card if applicable, LCD, backlight, etc)?
I live in Houston, where every building is air-conditioned to somewhere in the 68-70F region during the summer. Everyone thinks it's too cold, but by some Divine Decree, that's the temperature indoors. At home, we have our thermostat set at 78 during the summer. Assuming an average (over a 24-hour period) temperature of 88 degrees, that means we're saving roughly half of our A/C costs by using 78 instead of 68 or 70F. As temperatures fall, that number increases dramatically.
What really hit me was when we took a trip to Utah in October. Outside temperature: about 40F. Inside temperature: close to 80F. If they set the temperature down to 68F, they would save some 25% of their heating costs.
So Houston is colder in the summer than Utah is in the winter. Go figure.
Up until now, there have been a grand total of ZERO reasons for me to be interested in Vista. None of the new features hold any draw for me. It's good to see that there's finally something worthwhile in it--traffic shaping at the machine level is a good thing.
That's interesting--anandtech's review of the Core 2 Duos indicated that power consumption was really about the same across the board. The AMD EE chips were the least-power hungry, with just about every other chip all in a small span. Methinks someone's test procedures aren't quite accurate--not quite sure which ones, though.
One minor correction--the memory controller does not increase memory bandwidth per se, but it does significantly reduce latency, as well as the complexity and power consumption of the Northbridge.
AMD has consistently been a step behind Intel in the die-shrinking competition. The fact that AMD's chips run as cool as or cooler than their equal-performing Intel counterparts even at the larger process is a credit to good engineering.
Of course, since Intel will also be moving forward over the next 18 months, they might end up still in the lead. Making a huge turnaround like they did (from Netburst to Core) in such a short time is remarkable. Creating an architecture and setting up the process and designing a generation of chips takes a looooong time. Kudos to Intel for that. Now the ball is in AMD's court, and they have to respond.
At the high end, of course, Intel rules. What about processors that normal people buy?
I was recently looking at a Core2Duo review, and noticed something interesting. At each brand's bottom end (E6300 vs. X2 3800), Intel outperformed AMD. The problem in my mind, however, is that Intel's bottom-end starts at a higher price point than AMD's. Very smart marketing move by Intel. However, If you match the processors price-to-price, the E6300 matches up against the X2 4200 (both currently around $180), and there is relatively little performance difference. In other words, the price/performance metric really isn't in anyone's favor.
Another smart (but a little slimy) marketing move Intel has made is in the power dissipation numbers. AMD quotes their CPU's maximum dissipation, and Intel quotes a power figure for some arbitrary (under 100%) CPU load. Intel looks good here....until you actually measure a system's power draw at the outlet, and find that again, there's not that much difference. This may (and probably will) drastically change as AMD's 65nm parts get out, but we'll have to wait and see.
I work for a large energy company (you'd definitely know the name, and probably hate us)
We just rolled out WinXP last year (2005) as a replacement for NT4. That's...what, four years after WinXP came out? So I'd expect our company to move to Vista sometime in 2010 or 2011.
QUERTY was originally designed not to increase typing efficiency--in fact, the opposite is true. Typists were getting so fast with ABCDE layouts that the keys were jamming. QUERTY was designed in part to slow typists down.
The article should have called it "Dvorakesque" instead.
You make a very good point. I don't own a console of any sort (blasphemy, I know), and I've only once played Halo with four players on one TV, but it was pretty tough for my used-to-higher-resolution eyes to see much.
And since the Wii seems to be the only "next-gen" console that natively supports four players on one console, that extra resolution would come in handy.
It would be interesting to know how much of the video game market consists of people with HDTVs that actually do 720p/1080whatever. This also leads me to ask: "Does resolution really matter?" For some games, I'm sure it makes a difference, but I'd be willing to bet that high resolution won't make any difference to a large majority of gamers in a large number of titles.
Keeping to 480p seems like a good move by Nintendo. Many (I'd even go so far as to say most) of their games will be just as fun, you don't need a fancy TV just to enjoy it, and (perhaps most importantly) it keeps part cost, size, and power requirements down.
I was watching my teenage brother-in-law play Zelda (I don't recall which) on his gamecube the other day. The graphical style of the game was very effective, and I think it would actually lose appeal going to higher resolution.
Now all you experts can respond and tell me why I'm totally wrong.
I believe you mean a Nation of Wimps. Definitely a good read.
I lucked out--I found mine at a second-hand store for $2.
Most of the clicky keyboards use normal PS/2, so you should be just fine without any adapter, assuming your computer has PS2 ports.
Death to all Windows-key-including keyboards!
Seriously, I love my old-school, IBM Model M, battle-ship tough, obnoxiously loud, buckling spring clicky keyboard. No Windows key, a proper layout, and very nice tactile feedback.
While it is true that latency is worse with DDR2 than with DDR, AMD still has the latency advantage over Intel because of their on-board memory controller. Yes, AMD's latency is worse now than it was with DDR, but it's still better than Intel.
Besides, it all comes down to performance, and I don't see anybody complaining about the performance of DDR2.
Yup, it looks like the GPL is now (officially) legally binding in Germany. This says nothing about the EULAs that come with proprietary software. Those are different licenses with different terms, and would have to be tested individually.
I can't argue about the novelty of being able to "produce a nine million digit prime number by memorizing eight digits", but I'll take issue with your comment about the patent portfolio. Stanford have stated that they'll make the results available to everyone.
t her-cancer-related-disease, I won't mind if someone makes money off producing the cure.
I run Folding@Home since my computers are on 24/7 anyway--and if it leads to a cure for cancer/leukemia/Hodgekins'/alsheimer's/whatever-o
My concerns echo yours. Some venues are perfect for in-game ads, but some are about the worst place you could find them. I don't have a problem with in-game ads per se--it's a valid way for a game producer/distributor to increase revenue. But if it doesn't fit the game, forget it.
Take BF 2142, for instance. I don't think that a pristine Pepsi ad would do much for the immersion/realism of the game, and I have a hard time believing that the advertisers would be enthusiastic about giving players the ability to destroy/tag/mark the ad. A clean billboard in the middle of a war zone would be an eyesore (to put it lightly), and the potential for in-game grafitti (be it a tag, a mark left from an explosion, or whatever) is great.
Of course, this is EA we're talking about here...
Yes, the old Laserjets were practically indestructible. My parents bought a Laserjet 4p with their first PC (a Packard Bell with a Pentium 90) back in ....I think it was 94. That printer, with it's four-whopping-pages-per-minute, is still going strong, twelve years later. And my parents print more than your average user.
Exactly. Create limited user accounts, and only let them use those. Many (poorly-written) pieces of software claim that administrator privileges are necessary, but there are (almost) always F/OSS equivalents that don't have such a ridiculous requirement.
Here's a question for you, and all the other know-it-alls out there:
Why would Microsoft care about the next spike in computer sales? Why do they care whether it's Windows XP or Vista on those computers? They get paid one way or the other. Why bother writing Vista in the first place?
From my limited perspective, it seems the only reason to do a full rewrite now (an enormous investment) is so that you can either 1) gain marketshare and therefore revenue now, or 2) reduce the maintenance and support costs in the future by improving the architecture & design of the software. Option 1 doesn't seem very logical, considering the near-monopoly that Windows currently enjoys. So option 2.
But wait a minute--haven't we heard all sorts of complaints about the complexity of Windows, all the dependencies, etc? I would venture to guess that there is some value in having newly-written code that more cleanly does everything the old-and-patched code does, but does that kind of development work require the amount of investment Microsoft has made?
It's interesting that the concept of having more than two people in a game has not penetrated into sports games yet. Many other genres have long since adopted this kind of play, even on consoles, which were long constrained by lack of networking ability. First-person shooters? Yup. Role-playing games? Yup, to a dazzling extent. Real-time strategy? Not really, but the nature of the game inherently limits the number of players.
The one genre where teamwork should seem obvious lacks any sort of teamwork gameplay for more than two players. I wonder why it took an NFL player to bring it to the EA execs' minds.
Then again, when you have what amounts to a monopoly in sports games, there's little motivation to innovate. We certainly haven't seen EA do much in that area...
About four months ago, I switched my dad from Netscape 7.2 to Thunderbird and Firefox, after his email got somehow deleted on multiple occasions (email files simply went from giant-sized to empty with no other symptoms). Yesterday he called me for help--now, all the email from March to the present had disappeared. A few VNC-hoop-jumps later, I found the problem:
He had mistakenly opened Netscape, which had been resting peacefully since March. He was much relieved when we opened Thunderbird and all his email was still there.
The initial cost of the NAS drive is about $180 (Buffalo Linkstation, 250GB, FTP and SMB file serving, as well as a print server). That means over two years to recoup the initial investment, and by that time, it may be time for a replacement anyway.
Considering that your hard drive is only consuming a few (as in, 10) watts, replacing it with a notebook drive won't save you any significant amount of money, even over the VERY long term. The advantages for notebook drives come, as others have said, in their small size and lower power consumption for notebooks.
Microsoft has been experiencing for several years what Google is only now realizing: They're good at a few things, and that's it. Microsoft, feeling the pinch of having essentially only two major products (Windows and Office), wanted to diversify. While they have a near-monopoly on operating systems and office suites, that's the only market in which they have a large, profitable stake. So they try to branch out. Sometimes, they're more successful, like with their mouses. Sometimes, they're not, if you look at the financials of the Xbox. The problem they face, however, is that the markets they want to branch into are already well established. Crowded, even. So MS throws piles of money at it, hoping that it will work. At the same time, Apple and Linux are starting to make inroads in the desktop and server markets. MS sees their mainstay threatened.
Google is similar. They came up with a great product, their search engine. It was so good that it rapidly took a majority of the market, despite default IE settings. But then they stalled. GMail is good, but has nowhere near the market penetration as their search. Maps, groups, IM, blogs, calendar, spreadsheets...the list goes on. Google has some good products, but they're trying to expand into an already saturated market. And now their flagship product is faltering. Linkfarms, SEOs illegitimately boosting their rankings, and spammers are degrading the quality of Google's results.
Now, we're not talking about a mature industry with human-interactive robots. However, this smells strongly of "We need to find a new way to make money if Windows/Office starts slipping"