Energy consumption of the A1

[IonDeluxe]

That 7.5 watts would be just for the processor, you still have the MB, HD's CD's etc to run as well.

Last time I looked, which is a long time ago, intel were around 90 watts, and AMD were around 130 watts in thier power useage.However, this is directly proportional to heat so with that much savings in power you get a much less heat problem which translates into much less work area required to remove said heat.

What all this adds up to is a solid argument for using that processor for server clusters instead of and AMD or Intel type from a financial point of view.

Less power= less cost
Less power = less heat = less space = less cost.

[IonDeluxe]

Well dammy, I had a look at the link you posted and went through the entire thread and followed the links.I must be bored or something lol.
Anyway, as best as I could determine, that yes there are offerings at the same or lower power consumtion as the "stock standard" PPC CPU's.
They DO however, take a peformace hit to the extent that a celeron cpu of 60% the speed outperform them.I found many examples of this throught the links provided, and no contrary agruments.
On the plus side for these offerings, they seemed to be also very cheap in comparison.
The other problem with these is they are not even as "mainstream" as PPC based CPU's, and as such cant be bothered researching them.My main argument was directed at AMD and Intel in anycase, as these are by far the biggest manufacturers.

[IonDeluxe]

As I said, we were talking about "standard" cpu's.
I was not aware of any 1.8Ghz cpu from motorola, though IBM's 970 runs or at least is suppost to run at that speed.
You are quite right, its not all about speed, even in the PC market its not, though intel will have you believe otherwise.For the desktop is more about the video card...a fact I was made painfull aware of when I bought my first voodoo2( a wonderful card)
Not only did it increase my fps from around 10-60+, the graphics were hugely clearer, had more detail and ran at much higher resolution.(battlezone is the case in point here)

In any case, for the server style or laptop market, a cpu with a power advantage has a good case, its up to the marketing department to push it and make the sell.

In a realist point of view, it is quite difficult to say "this cpu beats that" and you will often find that like in all things, one way works for some, and another for others.