Re: Kernel thoughts of a Linux user

Jan Engelhardt
2004-12-14T18:05:06Z

>>>>So they could make themselves a favor and run something like seti@home.
>>>
>>>That does consume more energy than just sitting at idle. I've seen some
>>>estimates of how much it costs to run seti 24/7 rather than just sit idle,
>>>and the price was something like $80/year.
>>
>> For CPUs which don't have some sort of speedstep, it does not matter.
>> (Please correct me if I am wrong. It might be that HLT cycles are still
>> more power-conservative even without speedstep than 24/7 on the FPU.)
>
>You're wrong :)
>Nowadays the power consumption of a CPU is more than the rest of the
>machine altogether (including hard disks, etc.).
>
>On my P4 2.8GHz HT CPU, I've measured the power consumed by *the entire
>computer* more than doubling as the processor went from idle into 100%
>load.
>
>Of course, this doesn't include a monster 3D card, is it could very well
>consume something close to the processor when doing a lot of 3D operations.

I have got a power measure device from university and experimented myself.
I keep it short: running SETI (in constrast to nothing, i.e. HLT insns),
only costs me 17 more Watts. With a price of 6 cent per kWh, this makes
roughly 5.54 EUR per year when the machine is on 16h/340days.

(The theoretical case of 24/365 would make up 8.91 EUR.)

Wait, did not Intel pull back some processors because of their enormous heat
of some P4 (which melted some)? Well, I guess *there* is all your $$ going.

Jan Engelhardt
--
ENOSPC