On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 22:27 +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Wednesday 20 April 2005 1:50 pm, Paul Tansom wrote:
I was reading a piece in the current PC Pro magazine about electricity usage and it started to focus my attention on just how wasteful the x86 architecture is in terms of power. If Intel and AMD would concentrate a bit more on getting the extra performance without the need for heavy duty cooling life would be a lot easier in terms of being cheaper to run, quieter, longer battery life in laptops, etc., etc..
It gets worse in climates where Air Conditioning is used in most office spaces. 100% of the energy a CPU uses is turned into heat output...heat which in turn has to be removed by running the Air Con harder and longer. Air conditioning is not 100% efficient so for every 50 Watts of power you pump into a CPU you waste another 50 Watts plus trying to cool the office.
The P4M is a nice little chip (well as nice as it gets with X86 it seems) you can get respectable performance with less than 25 Watts (for just the CPU mind) Compare that to the current revision of P4 desktop chips than can require more than 100 Watts and it's obvious where the office desktop market should be heading.
I have seen the suggested availability of P4M desktop systems (or at least the availability of the components required to build them) Two barriers are cost and a general public that (thanks to chip manufacturer marketing) is sold well and truly up the garden path of MHz myth.
Don't I know it. I have a single small room as my office (working for myself as I do). In it I have way too much kit for one person, although there is reason for all of it. In winter it is pleasantly warm, in summer it is way too hot. On one hand I could look into air conditioning to cool the room, but it would make more sense to reduce the amount of heat being generated. When you start thinking along these lines you get into the debate of costs vs savings balanced against practicality and benefit for the environment.
Looking at my setup and ignoring those machines that only get switched on when needed (Mac, Amiga, RiscPC, other old 8 bit machines) I have 4 servers and 3 desktops! One desktop is a family one and not in the office, so that can be ignored. Of the other two, one is my primary Linux box and the other is a Windows one for testing (I support Windows unfortunately). On the server side I have the firewall and a DMZ box hosting some mailing lists and websites (as backup for my external server. Inside the firewall there's the main mail server (with ldap, dns and a few other bits too) and a development server (web mainly, but also acts as file and print sharing to). The two internal boxes backup to each other. In technical IT practises this makes sense, but for one person the power usage is just plain silly. I've started to weigh up the pros and cons of consolidating onto a single box with UML or Xen systems to reduce power and heat!
A quick look into power supplies that have intelligent fans, for example, found one that looked good (listed as fanless which is incorrect, but it does spin down when not needed). That costs around £90, so how many years would it take to repay the cost in terms of power savings!
On another side, when you look at recycling old PC kit which is arguably less energy efficient, is it better to scrap it and use something that is cheaper to run. Then again the current range of CPUs are real power hogs (compare around 8W for a 486 to 120W for a top end P4).
Being environmentally friendly is hard work and a confusing area, however good that may be - and necessary in the long run.
With AMD being reasonably strong in the market, at least visibly, it can be easy to forget the term Wintel - Linux may well work on a lot of different architectures, but x86 is the one most used, and that is significantly as a result of it being the primary (and now only) platform for Windows. Is there nowhere its legacy doesn't infect?!
I loved Alpha, not sure who exactly to blame for it no longer existing. At least MS tried to support it as a platform (for a while)
It's pretty much unsustainable to support more than one arch when dealing with closed source Operating Systems and Applications. A few of the big players will start only offering binaries for the most prevalent platform and like sheep the rest will follow, before long driver support would also vanish for the less popular platforms.
Even right in the middle of the availability of NT for Alpha I can honestly say that I would have never considered using it because the application and driver availability just wasn't there.
It's the effect of market forces unfortunately, and the cheapest up front cost will almost always win over technical excellence (Betamax vs VHS) and on going running costs don't usually get considered (cheap printers, expensive cartridges). I rather liked the RISC idea and always had a soft spot for the ARM chips (although I've only recently acquired any machines that use them) - although part of that may be their home grown heritage (although they are now Intel in much the same way as old time software legend Ultimate Play the Game are now part of Microsoft!).