Re: Increasing minimum 'i386' processor
On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:29:01AM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
> People save power to save money, to save cooling, or to save the environment.
Right, but far from relevant when comparing old systems to new systems
in terms of power saving.
> Buying new hardware isn't the way to save money
> , power is cheap enough in most
> places that the cost of a new Atom system would cover 4+ years of running a
> P3. Cooling can be an issue, but usually only in a DC where computational
> density is the most important issue and therefore multi-core 64bit CPUs win.
> For saving the environment it's a really good thing to avoid buying new
> systems.
Well, its not like your more modern systems fell from heaven. At the
point where you bought them, you eventually had all options to buy less
power consuming hardware, yet you didn't. But we are really moving far
to far away from the original discussion.
> > The point is not weither you can change the PSU of a P3 with the PSU of
> > an Pentium-D or newer. The point is weither a Pentium D with a better
> > Pentium D-suitable PSU would have given different results.
> > (or same vice versa)
> > Because, today you can chose between PSUs which (usually) vary between 70%
> > and 90% efficiency. Dunno what efficiency previous PSUs had.
> > So if your P3 might happen to have a PSU with an efficiency of 90%,
> > while your Pentium-D has an efficiency of 70%, this *will* result in a
> > significant difference in comparibility of the two values.
>
> The difference in recorded power use between my Pentium-D system and one of
> the more efficient P3 systems is a factor of 3. A 70%-90% PSU efficiency
> difference will not impact that.
Come on. All I was saying is that the values cannot be compared, because
its unsure weither they are based on comparable hardware or not.
Picking _one_ example from your test sample will not disprove that
claim.
Apart from that, I said that your stats miss more information than just
the efficiency of the PSU.
Another one would be what a PSU is actually used, because its a fact
that the energy efficiency of power supplies drops significantly at low
loads, so it might even be important weither a 200W, 300W or 400W PSU
was chosen. You say that your PSUs are designed for small loads, but
what exactly does that mean?
What about the graphics cards of the systems? Low-end card or does one
of the systems probably have a high-end gaming ghraphics cards which
takes 30-60W on its own?
> > Well, while that is your expectation, you did not back it with facts and
> > therefore we need to assume that this expectation is false.
>
> So far I've been the only person in this discussion to supply any facts about
> power use of various systems.
Yeah and thats fine, I just want to point out, that your "facts" have to
be taken with care when trying to make an assesment for a
distribution-wide decision.
Regards,
Patrick
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