WOW! Inteldiots and AMDiots are on the rise

[nutball]

What you say is correct, if you don't care about size, or noise.

Prescott coolers don't have to be noisy, there's plenty of sinks that can cool that chip without being loud. Besides, cases can be noise insulated, does wonders with fan noise in particular, as well as harddrive actuator sound.

Well, there's not-very-noisy, there's quiet and there's silent, I require my PC to fit somewhere between the latter two. Suffice it to say that I can hear a mouse fart over my current PC. Cooling some of the older, hotter Athlons quietly (my definition of quiet here) is a serious problem even with exotic HSF solutions, and they're a mere 80-90W.

 

[Rambler]

Why are you people so afraid of heat? 100-ish watts isn't that much. I can go to any supermarket and pick up 120W incandescent bulbs or 500W halogen bulbs. My tea perculator's 600W and my toaster 800. My vacuum cleaner motor is at 1600W.

For me the difference is that i have lights on in my room only for few hours in the evenings, using vacuum cleaner - that's like 1hr/week at most, but my computer is on 24/7 so then it IMHO makes a difference in power consumption.

 

[MPI]

Why are you people so afraid of heat? 100-ish watts isn't that much. I can go to any supermarket and pick up 120W incandescent bulbs or 500W halogen bulbs. My tea perculator's 600W and my toaster 800. My vacuum cleaner motor is at 1600W.

With a modern heatsink (which will be a chunk of copper and/or aluminium at about half a kilo or more but who cares?), 100W can be cooled off without creating a huge ruckus, not to mention what can be done with watercooling.

You people are a buncha wussies! What counts in the end is price and performance, not how much power the chip draws. If system X gives 50.000 bogoops at 40W and system Y gives 60.000 bogoops at 105W without being significantly more expensive, I'd pick the 105W chip without the slightest hesitation.

It's not about the absolute heat wattage or the power drain, it's about heat _density_. A 100W in heat isn't that big a deal generally, your body generates about that much, but a 100W in a bit of silicon 1cm^2 is. The heat _density_ is way more than a stove hotplate! How you're going to dissipate that heat uniformly throughout the chip isn't trivial and is one of the biggest problems with scaling silicon CPUs right now.

See, the problem is that it's not enough to just dissipate the heat, the important thing is the temperature inside the core. The surface temperature of the chip, which is what the heatsink has contact with obviously, can be significantly lower than any point inside the chip. On top of that you can get "hotspots" inside the chip where certain areas get significantly more work than other areas, and can either come up under certain loads(like doing a loop of the same FP instruction) or just be used every cycle. The tricky part is to get a chip that under any given load doesn't get one single transistor to overheat anywhere in the CPU. If we continue to crank up the wattage input at the same time as we scale down the core, we're heading for whitewater real soon, if we're not there already. Have you noticed that the dual-cores coming six months from now have a significantly lower clockrate than the single cores we have right now? Heat density. Did you hear that Intel had the problem with the 3.6GHz throttling with standard cooling? Heat density.

And even if you get your 130W rig running with your mega HSF, silver thermal compound and whatnot, what happens if you don't dust your case in 3 months?

Well, the point is that this isn't something to just sweep under the rug, it's a non-trivial problem and personal opinion is that 130W in these cores is beyond every day usage, even 100W is pushing it, enthusiasts maybe can handle it, but it's a bit much of a hassle even for semi-experienced users.

Now, if you're willing to pump juice, wait for the diamond substrate semiconductors, they project them to handle 3kW/cm2. Just connect it to the central heating and you can do away with the boiler.

 

[Moloch]

The A64 are def. a gamers cpu, but amd needs to seriously improve SSE2 performance, as they're not doin so well in media applications, and other general apps.

 

[jvd]

Don't see a point argueing . A system based around an athlon 64 is normaly on par with that of a p4 ( rateing vs clockspeed ) and its cheaper.


Meaning an athlon 64 3500+ system is faster than an equal p4 system , ram chip mobo .



So i go with that

 

[Guden Oden]

It's not about the absolute heat wattage or the power drain, it's about heat _density_.

Thanks for the essay, but that isn't any kind of issue an end-user has to worry about. One sticks the chip in the mobo and slaps on a sufficiently efficient heatsink using the appropriate thermal interface material, end of story.

 

[MPI]

It's not about the absolute heat wattage or the power drain, it's about heat _density_.

Thanks for the essay, but that isn't any kind of issue an end-user has to worry about. One sticks the chip in the mobo and slaps on a sufficiently efficient heatsink using the appropriate thermal interface material, end of story.

Worry and worry... You missed the point entirely. At some point it just doesn't work regardless of HSF, maybe a little lease of time can be given with more and more exotic cooling... But we're hitting an engineering brick wall, if we haven't already.

 

[Clashman]

My tea perculator's 600W and my toaster 800. My vacuum cleaner motor is at 1600W.

There's a big difference between a toaster that you might run for a few minutes a day, a vaccum cleaner used for maybe 20 or 30 minutes every week or so, and a computer that you leave running near-constantly. Power draw can play significant role in electric bills if you are that kind of computer user.

 

[Guden Oden]

Power draw can play significant role in electric bills if you are that kind of computer user.

So replace some of your incandescent bulbs with fluorescent lights then FFS, or prepare to fork out for the electricity if you want your box running 24/7... I have almost exclusively low-energy lights in my home so my conscience is fairly clean.

 

[ANova]

Hmm? Whaaa? Did I miss something?

 

[cristic]

Hmm? Whaaa? Did I miss something?

Nope, just the fact that if you want a P4 you have to use only fluorescent lights in your home... :|

 

[_xxx_]

Oh, I thought it was those lights with a proprietary P4 interface...

 

[T2k]

The terms Inteldiots and AMDiots are stupid.

Perfect essence of my thoughts.

 

[ANova]

Hmm? Whaaa? Did I miss something?

Nope, just the fact that if you want a P4 you have to use only fluorescent lights in your home... :|

You mean a Prescott based P4.