Energy consumption of the A1

[RedWarrior]

Hey all- just read on morphzone.org something about 1GhZ G4 chips running on 7.5 watts!

Now, my computer is not exactly the latest & greatest- 1.3ghz athlon... but my Power supply is about 300watts!!  Does my computer actually draw that much power??

Just wondering how efficient we can expect the A1 to be??



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music: made on Amiga: http://mp3.com.au/track.asp?id=25432

[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.

[dammy]

by IonDeluxe on 2003/4/20 7:30:21

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.

There was an interesting thread over on MooBunny about this subject not too long ago.  You may want to take a look at:

Moo

As you can see, the bogus power consumption arguement has little meaning once you take a hard look at it.

Dammy

[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.

[dammy]

by IonDeluxe on 2003/4/20 13:01:55

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.

Yup, which are about the same GHz speeds.  As the article I linked pointed out, once the G4 hits 1.8 GHz, it's power consumption goes up into the upper 40's vs high 50's for Athlon 2200XP.  Which means the power consumption issue is not a big issue at all.

Dammy

[Beakster]

so if the faster intel and amd are using more power at higher clock speeds, does this mean the cpus in the A1 and Pegasos can be overclocked to significatly higher clock speeds.  The pics I have seen of them show no fan, so if one was added and to begin with they are using so little power, can they maybe be doubled in speed?

Accepting of course all the warning which go with overclocking, it seems like a good idea.

I dont know how the clock speeds on the A1 and pegasos are set (jumpers, dips etc.) so maybe someone knows if it can be done or not?

[Aragorn]

http://www.geek.com/procspec/amd/barton.htm
about 70w for AMD:S latest
http://www.geek.com/procspec/intel/northwood.htm
about 70w for Intels latest
80w with hyperthreading

Intel Itanium 800MHz 130w

[hagar]

IonDeluxe wrote:
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.

An Intel mobile Pentium III processor @ 800 MHz is supposed to be around 9.8 watts.

Have a look at:
http://www.intel.com/support/processors/mobile/pentiumiii/tti004.htm

Then check out the difference in watts between a 800 MHz and a 866 MHz running on full speed, quite impressive I belive  ;-)

[Floid]

dammy wrote:

As you can see, the bogus power consumption arguement has little meaning once you take a hard look at it.

Hmm.  This thread (here and Moo-wards) seems to be using MHz as a performance metric.  It's well-known that Via chips previous to the.. C5X, is it?  I was never much into Bible study .. had a half-clocked FPU; so far as I know, the 750CX and friends are not so limited.  It's not easy to find SPECmark numbers for the Via chips; anyone have any?

Point is, this is apples to kiwifruit, and we should all know better.  PowerPC- especially in the G3 low-end- no doubt has a price/performance advantage per watt; in tradeoff, it's obviously not x86-compatible, and top clock rates (upgrade paths for PPC-implemented applications) are limited and expensive (pre-970).  The G4 is an extra-special case, since depending on the application- and the skill of your programmers- you either harvest a pretty huge improvement from Altivec, or see nothing at all.

Any "sane" datacenter will netboot much of their hardware, so drives aren't as much of an issue for that market- and places that don't are likely making purchases based on convenience/maintenance cost/religious reasons anyway.  Whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not, the current Amigacentric PPC offerings are competing more with Qubes, briQs, and C3s/C5s than anything Newisys is going to be selling... and people do seem to use Qubes, briQs, and mini-ITX hardware.  Transmeta might be up and coming again, and Intel has low-power offerings, but they throw those at the blade market- and charge a fair premium for the privelege.  (Okay, right now a 1GHz TM5800 'blade' from RLX starts at $999, and the cheapest 1U Celeron I can configure in 5 minutes on Dell's site is $2,196- admittedly a much more capable machine, but it's not even low-power, and if you're, say, a .com trying to replace the space-heater surplus P-II 300s you began with...  PowerPC makes a more convincing argument for business than for home, though of course, so does Via.)

The problem, as always, is amortizing the R&D enough to pass the price/performance on to the customer.... which, again, we should be painfully aware of by now.

[Graak]

Hmm. This thread (here and Moo-wards) seems to be using MHz as a performance metric. It's well-known that Via chips previous to the.. C5X, is it? I was never much into Bible study .. had a half-clocked FPU; so far as I know, the 750CX and friends are not so limited. It's not easy to find SPECmark numbers for the Via chips; anyone have any?

From what I've seen, the VIA C3 sucks fataly. A C3@1 GHz is comparable (remember, from the tests I've seen) to a Pentium II 400 MHz / K6-III 450 MHz.

To sum it all up, it sucks  :-P

[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.

[N7VQM]

Graak wrote:
From what I've seen, the VIA C3 sucks fataly. A C3@1 GHz is comparable (remember, from the tests I've seen) to a Pentium II 400 MHz / K6-III 450 MHz.

I have an 800Mhz C3 in my Linux box.  For interger related operations, it beats my K6-II 500Mhz by about 60%.  It's floating point performance is on par with that K6-II.  But that's not the point of the C3 line of processors.  They were designed to work well with office-type applications while consuming less power and running cooler and quieter than an Intel or AMD processor.  In that role, they work great.  Who needs a 3Ghz windtunnel for word processing?

[dammy]

There are some comparisons over on Tomshardware

Dammy