Big Iron: Power hungry?

Posted Aug 20th 2008 1:00PM by Rafe Brox
Filed under: Culture, Features, Hardware, Opinion

Tim Allen wasn't precisely the same flavor of hardware guy that we are, but his Tool Time mantra, "More Power!" certainly resonates with a lot of computer enthusiasts. Not only do the games we play and the applications we use require more and more computational chutzpah to perform well, but the silicon bits themselves are not shy about sucking down the wattage to do it.

If you're considering an upgrade or a new build, you're going to need to feed that beast. Onward, to the supplies of power!

Moore's Law has produced immense benefits in terms of processing power, but the flip side of this has been an increase in the amount of electricity consumed. Fortunately, advances in micro-architecture, transistor design, and fabrication technology mean that we're getting more computation done per watt than ever, even if we're still consuming a lot more watts. How many more? It takes about fifteen times as much power to feed a QX-series quad-core than it did to drive a first-generation Pentium 66 (140 vs 9 watts). Generational evolutionary improvements mean we're getting a lot more than ten times more processing out of the new chip, which is a testament to the skill of the engineers and chip designers.

Fogey Check: Remember when your CPU was passively cooled by one of those green anodized aluminum heatsinks, without a fan at all? Still have any of those suckers lying around? I think I made Christmas ornaments out of the last couple I found at my place. Festive and geeky!

With the increasing share of the market going to mobile computing, low-voltage variants of both Intel and AMD chips have been coming to market as well - they offer the same processing performance with a lower power draw, but come at a price premium. A couple of CPU generations ago (the first Athlon M-series, in particular), they were sought out by overclockers for the extra thermal headroom they offered for folks trying to push that particular envelope. Now, these chips are almost exclusively used for notebooks and other applications where power draw and heat are prime considerations due to packaging constraints and/or battery longevity.

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Tags: 80plus, big-iron, crossfire, crossfirex, efficiency, featured, features, hardware, maintenance, overclocking, performance, power, power-supplies, power-supply, psu, sli, system-building, upgrade, upgrades, wattage

2 Comments

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

"Remember when your CPU was passively cooled by one of those green anodized aluminum heatsinks, without a fan at all?"

My XT's 8088 didn't have any kind of heatsink whatsoever, passively cooled or otherwise. How fogey-like does that make me?Posted at 3:03PM on Aug 20th 2008 by paralipsis

P-

In doing some of the research for this, I was looking at historical wattage requirements, and while it's generally been an upward sawtooth wave since the beginning of the PC era, the original Big Iron was using 150KW+ (room-sized behemoths whose names ended in MACS).

Even the Atom and Nano put out enough heat to warrant a modicum of cooling, even if it's of the heatpipe variety these days.Posted at 3:11PM on Aug 20th 2008 by rafe.brox

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