Leaner Computing: Less Might be More - The Heat and the Power (Page 2 of 4 )
Why am I bringing up comic relief from my university days? Because if you look at the total dissipated power (TDP) from a modern P4, you might be alarmed. The high end processors have gone through 100W. That's more heat than a 90W bulb. In case you have one of those in your desk lamp, I highly suggest not using it to warm your hands on cold days. It's really hot, and it does bad things to your electric bill. Imagine always having one on, and that's what it's like when you have one of these processors. Granted they aren't always creating that much heat, but there is still a not insignificant amount of energy being used there. Explain to me why mom and pops need something like that? I'm sure they would appreciate their bills being lower rather than being able to run benchmarks quicker.
Again, look at who's using this computer. They aren't likely to be doing CPU intensive tasks. Would they appreciate lots of memory to run the latest Microsoft bloatware, and leave multiple windows open, and all the other generally annoying things people do? Yes. Same goes for a fast hard drive. Not a RAID 0 array mind you, but any recent ATA drive will suffice. Heck, even integrated graphics, as long as it's in the form of an nForce2 or Radeon IGP and not Intel's not so Extreme Graphics will cover most, if not all, situations. And that's becoming a valid point. If you were unaware, many new graphics cards require a molex connector to drain juice directly from the power supply. They aren't just for show either -- these monsters are able to well outdraw what the AGP interface can provide when they start doing tasks that kick them into 3D mode. That friends, is a lot of juice going to two pieces of silicon that most of the time aren't going to be doing a heck of a lot.
What I'm getting at is that most current boxes are incredibly overpowered. I'm not going to say "overpriced" because as a commodity industry, people now have access to more computing horsepower for cheaper than at any time previous to this. It's nuts. I remember when our family bought our first computer. We paid over three grand for an 8 MHz 286 machine, and to be quite honest, it didn't take long for the software to supersede what that computer could handle.
We paid that much again for a 486DX-33 system a few years later. Wash, rinse, repeat. Even with overclocking, which we started doing with our first Pentium box, the processor always became a bottleneck. Not long after with the advent of the Pentium Pro though, Intel's determination and undying worship at the alter of CPU frequency pushed much faster than software developers could come up with tasks for it to do for Joe Sixpack.
Now, you can get a cheap Celeron or Duron for a handful of dollars, and it'll wipe the floor with everyday office tasks, where something else besides the CPU will almost always be the restraining factor on performance (Like say, the user. You can only type so fast). Yet folks constantly turn their noses up to these types of systems, like they are equivalent to an 80's Hyundai.
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