Re: Intel Inside no more

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:24:06 GMT, Johannes
<johs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
>
>Tony Hill wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 17:30:57 GMT, no@xxxxxxxxxxxx (dannysdailys)
>> wrote:
>> >> David Kanterwrote:
>> >Yes, and one certainly could say the same thing about you.
>> >
>> >While I'm hardly "new" to these boards, when it comes to Intel I am
>> >quite dogmatic. I've been watching them since the beginning. You
>> >follow their religion of numbers and d*mned the clock speed. Well,
>> >the clock speed has just done them in and many of us have known this
>> >for a great many years. How many more power plants would you have us
>> >build for your house burners? I say none... I'd be very curious;
>> >just how much electricity has Intel wasted in the aggregate?
>> >Aggregate meaning every machine out there, that a low power AMD could
>> >have done. If some numbers guru reads this, he'll figure it out and
>> >post.
>>
>> One doesn't need to be much of a guru to figure this one out, a bit of
>> simple math will suffice. Figure that there are roughly 200M PC
>> processors sold each year, AMD has about 17% of the market, Intel has
>> about 81% of the market (VIA and Transmeta combine for the remaining
>> 1-2% of the market). Given that we're referring only to
>> Athlon64/Sempron vs. Pentium4/Celeron here, we're really only looking
>> at the last two years worth of CPUs and only desktop CPUs. Roughly
>> 50% of all CPUs sold are for desktops, 40% for laptops and 10% for
>> servers (note: these are very rough approximations).
>>
>> So, total CPUs in question is 400M, of which 324M are Intel chips and
>> 162M are Intel desktop P4/Celeron chips that theoretically could have
>> been AMD desktop Athlon64/Sempron chips instead.
>>
>> > Then what will you say? Hello? It's called thermal heat and
>> >I believe there might be almost a 50 to 70 watt difference for like
>> >performance in the high end.
>>
>> The difference is probably an average of about 50W at full load.
>> Intel sells a LOT of lower-end Celeron chips that don't consume all
>> that much more power than an AMD Sempron of similar performance
>> levels.
>>
>> So, with all our numbers in place it's quite a simple calculation:
>>
>> 50W/processor * 162M processors = 8,100MW worldwide (roughly one
>> decent sized power plant)
>>
>> But there's more. The above assumes that the computers are powered on
>> 24 x 7 and are running at full load that whole time. In reality we
>> can probably approximate to having computers powered on only half of
>> the time (on average) and idle 99% of the time (even while someone is
>> actually USING their computer it's going to be idle pretty close to
>> 100% of the time). At idle the difference in power consumption
>> between the chips would tend to drop somewhat, maybe down to about
>> 30W.
>>
>> So, 30W/processor * 162M processor * 0.5 = 2,430MW
>>
>> I would guess that this figure is on the high-end of the real-world
>> figure, but it should at least be in the right order of magnitude.
>
>However, it's the peak-time power from power plants that matters, that is
>what decides size of infrastructure and what causes blackouts. There is no
>efficient way to store power that is not demanded at a fixed generator rate.
>(just my 1c worth).

I believe that where local geography/facilities permit hydro pump storage
is in regular use in various parts of the world. I don't know what came of
the plan to pump compressed gas into impermeable rock cavities - seemed a
bit hairbrained way back when it was proposed. For peak load however, I
believe that, relatively inexpensive to build, gas turbines are often used
to cover peak-loads over the base-load provided by the large infrastructure
plants.

Somebody had better figure this one out if wind turbines are to become
viable in any sense at all.:-)

--
Rgds, George Macdonald
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Planning a new quiet, home, mid-range system for business apps, no games...
    ... one of their own power supplies, the Earth Watts 500, which is not ... Great board, for an Intel build. ... This now raises some questions about AMD processors and boards. ... see some AMD mainboards advertised as supporting certain memory speeds ONLY ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)
  • Re: Curly soon to be out of a job
    ... > There is a big difference between Power and IA64: ... > scalability features that IA64 has, then Intel can probably still ... > But if AMD makes its 8086 scalable to wildfire/superdome class ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Ancient P3 - upgradeable?
    ... games then maybe a motherboard with on-board graphics would be better value ... > roughly equivalent to the Intel Celeron range? ... the non-intel chipmakers could produce chips that behaved exactly like the ... more-or-lss gone away because the AMD chips are not being sold as plug-in ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: Ia32
    ... ability to program/control older chips anyway. ... | Intel Pentium II 1997 32-bit ... | with AMD ... | their own independent x86 designs with the AM486, ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: debian-user] Re: AMD vs Intel and the Debian kernel
    ... run in 32-bit compatibility mode. ... I'm very much satisfied with amd processor. ... Intel it is cheaper and faster. ... different chips with different hardware details. ...
    (Debian-User)