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.
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.