Higher performance vs. Lower power consumption

[Blazkowicz]

I'm thinking, perhaps's we're on 230V (I think that's it, though we had 220 before) because of WW2. as there hasn't be war on US main terrority for a long while you didn't have to rebuild thus no incentive to switch.

 

[Frank]

I'm thinking, perhaps's we're on 230V (I think that's it, though we had 220 before) because of WW2. as there hasn't be war on US main terrority for a long while you didn't have to rebuild thus no incentive to switch.

Some EU countries used 220, others 240. So they made it 230 everywhere in Europe.

 

[Blazkowicz]

what about power management on GPUs? I find the wattage measures of machines idling with a G80 or R580 offending. Why is so much power wasted? could or do we have voltage regulation, not frequency throttle only, and what about disabling quad and clusters of arithmetic units?
Under the desktop you typically won't need more that one quad and one cluster/multiprocessor.
There should be game profiles as well. e.g. on a G80-like with six quads and eight maths units (clusters), run two quads and one math unit with Q3 games, four quads and one math units on some unreal 2.x game without shaders, four and four on a doom 3 game, all units on a crytek game, etc.

 

[Frank]

The best way to limit power consumption is to reduce the frequency. Which is what is done. But, a lot of software (that only measures CPU speed once) has problems with that.

Switching off units that aren't used can be done, but that is very tricky. It requires a three-state bus all around them (on-chip) and it makes scheduling stuff a lot harder. It's easier just to reduce the voltage.