| How Many Miles per Gallon Does Your CPU Get? |
| Written by Hank Green | ||
| Saturday, 10 June 2006 | ||
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We might all be plenty happy to ogle over the next gigahertz revolution, but CNet recently pointed out that rating processor performance alone is becoming a useless measure. We can make the processors fast, the quesiton is, can we do it without burning through the mother board (and the electric bill). Unfortunately, the MPG of a CPU (theoretically measured in performance per watt) is not a simple thing to calculate. The measure of hertz, meaning processes per second, is now pretty much ignored. There's no perfect way to measure the performance of a CPU, and there is really no way at all to accurately measure performance per watt.
Unfortunately the performance per watt of a processor tends to vary significantly as the processor is used more or less. Intel is measuring it's processors at full load, something very rarely seen by a processor, with encouraging results. AMD, on the other hand, says a more natural system for measuring performance should be tried. Already the battle has begun, Intel claiming that its new server processor, Woodcrest, has overtaken AMD in terms of performance per watt, but AMD disagrees. All of this, if you can believe it, is a big deal for IT industry power consumption. Fifteen percent of money spent in the operation of data centers goes to power and cooling down all of the hotness the processors create. And the fight over performance per watt is a good one for the industry, the customers and the environment. Let's just hope they can agree on how to measure it. Note: Since this article got Dugg there's been a bit of discussion about the lack of real, hearty, technical information here. Let me just say that I wrote this mostly as a redirect to the CNet article, which does have a lot of great information on it, and that I didn't expect this to get on Digg. It was nice surprise though. Thanks to everyone who's visiting EcoGeek for the first time, and check out the CNet article if you want more details.
Comments
(16)
The Next CPU War
written by a guest , June 13, 2006
It will certainly be interesting where the companies go with this. On www.tomshardware.com, they did a check on the CPU's under full load and AMD smoked Intel with the CPU's that home user's and gamers would buy. I think it is an important measure to make, and it is refreshing to see the companies making strides for more eneregy efficient CPU's.
Looking Forward
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
Apple left the PowerPC family at a good time. The G5 was way too hot and the G4 had a very good performace per watt for a chip that was designed in 1999 so i lookforward to intel's new chips for my mac and AMD's new chips for my PC
Sweet
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
This is a really good article, it'd probably be a good idea to put this to use and visit CPU Muscle Tone
Cool
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
As long as we don't have flaming internet cafe's, we're fine.
Technical Detail?
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
Some technical details would have been nice. Only addressing the fact that performance per watt is important and at the same time hard to measure, while an interesting starter for a discussion, is just that, a starter. You mention that there is a disagreement between AMD and Intel over performance per watt, but it ends there. What are the arguments on either side? You mention data centers, so how do data center processors such as Itanium and PA-RISC and Ultrasparc and Alpha (yes these are still in many data centers) compare?
Interesting article opener, but I wish it would have been more than that.
Proof Readers?
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
"Fifteen percent of money spent in the operation of data centers goes to power and cooling down all of the hotness the processors create."
hotness? I think the word you're looking for is "heat"
Laptops
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
I guess laptops are out.
Neal Saferstein
Data centers...
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
Actually high-speed SCSI drives, power supplies, and UPSs can easily overtake CPUs in heat generation, depending on how the data center is geared.
cpu\'s
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
The Intel chips they are testing and saying are better than amd's aren't in the market place yet so saying that the AMD chip smokes the Intel and vice versa is a redundant comment. You'll have to wait until later in the year before tomshardware can test anything. And the current indications are that the new Intel's will be quicker and quicker/watt
Back this up!
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
There are no explanations of any sort of depth in this article. I can't believe it's on digg. What a disgrace to the credibility of both digg and ecogeek.
From EcoGeek
written by a guest , June 18, 2006
Hey, this was meant mostly a redirect to the CNet article, not a standalone article. I'm just happy that consumers and producers care about processor efficiency, and I wanted to write a bit about it. I didn't expect it to get on Digg either, I just woke up this morning saw the spike. Crazy... But if you want more info, please, check out the article at CNet, it's fairly comprehensive.
New metric at SPEC
written by a guest , June 19, 2006
re: Proof Readers
written by a guest , June 19, 2006
I think by cooling down all the hotness, the author was referring to all the hot ladies attracted to the IT crew by all their awesome equipment.
I could be wrong, though.
From EcoGeek
written by a guest , June 19, 2006
That's definitely what I meant.
AMD sucks.
written by a guest , June 20, 2006
To the first commenter- The first AMD chip I ever tried was an Athlon 1500 tbird. And it's also the last AMD chip I will ever try. I went through three different heatsink/fans, in increasing sizes and ratings, nothing would please that damn processor. The best I could get it to do was 72 c if I underclocked it. NEVER buy an AMD proc if you care about heat.
Huh, That\'s wierd
written by a guest , June 21, 2006
Ok to the first guy that commented on my first entry: I mentioned www.tomshardware.com review, because, AT THIS POINT IN TIME, that was how the CPU's stack up. I hate to say it but at this point in time AMD home based CPU's produce less heat as the statistics show. If Intel is coming out with new chips, that's great, but guess what, they are not out yet, so anything said about them is just speculation not fact.
To the "AMD sucks" guy: take a look at the data out there for the current CPU's and guess what you'll find. That's right, AMD CURRENTLY produces less heat. Again, if you want to go off of speculation or personal pref, thats fine, but I like to go off of hard data and statistics. I am a logical sort of guy, and if someone tells me something that they cannot back up, like what your saying, then I will tend to not trust what they say. I am sorry you Inteliheads can't seem to understand the importance of data and real world statistics, but that is your fallacy not mine. | ||
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Sure, you could hold a thermometer to your CPU and run a billion calculations and divide one by the other, but AMD and Intel are going to start advertising these numbers, so they're going to have to figure out some industry standards. 
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