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Performance per What?

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
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May 18, 1997
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bit-tech’s own Tim Smalley has posted an editorial on the use of Performance pet Watt as a standard on PC components. Mr. Smalley feels that maybe we need to consider making some changes to the system at hand.
 
I could care less about performance per watt. I know If I want the fastest kick ass rig that it's going to use a lot of electricity. So what...
Its like buying a Ferrari and bitching about getting 8 miles to the gallon.
 
Just slap an energy star sticker on retail or OEM computers with how much it will cost to run per year with typical usage. That takes care of the bulk of desktops sold (DIY and prebuilt "gamer" systems will be on their own). That still wouldn't be perfect, but I think it could lead to more competitiveness in getting the power consumption down.
 
I do like having good performance per watt. They should really focus on this issue in R&D, perhaps slow down the graphics card release cycles a bit to accommodate more
mainstream users into the high-end graphics card segment (those that do not have crazy 700W power supplies).
 
I couldnt care less about performance per watt
Click to expand...

Whilst its a nice idea for severs in a datacenter and stuff like that, for my gaming computer i couldnt care how many watts it uses (in reason). It would be distratous for the GPU market if they had to holdback on performance to save a few watts.
 
lol funny you guys say that. I would like to see tougher more efficient ppw.

think 5 years ahead. that 700watt psu isn't going to cut it imagine 7kwatt psu. for 80cores processors running 5ghz each eating 87watt each. 7kwatt * 16 cent x 24 hour x30 days = $806~
 
Mega2 said:
lol funny you guys say that. I would like to see tougher more efficient ppw.

think 5 years ahead. that 700watt psu isn't going to cut it imagine 7kwatt psu. for 80cores processors running 5ghz each eating 87watt each. 7kwatt * 16 cent x 24 hour x30 days = $806~
Click to expand...

That would be a global crisis and an energy disaster.
 
One more comment on this issue: while performance is very, very important, performance without regard to anything else is extremism. Rarely, has extremism been proven to be an effective way of doing anything. Rather, a conscious understanding of all the components that make a product feasible and a train of development that is sustainable should be pushed. Environmentally, this idea is more sound. Of course, there will always be those that say "screw the rest, just do whatever it takes without limits", but I hope that many people will can see the danger with that kind of mindset.
 
Mega2 said:
lol funny you guys say that. I would like to see tougher more efficient ppw.

think 5 years ahead. that 700watt psu isn't going to cut it imagine 7kwatt psu. for 80cores processors running 5ghz each eating 87watt each. 7kwatt * 16 cent x 24 hour x30 days = $806~
Click to expand...
I hope that is a gross exaggeration.

IIRC the typical wall outlet in the US tops out around 1650-1800 watts (amps X volts). Any higher and you have to use multiple outlets and bigger fuses, or switch to the larger plugs found on ovens, dryers, and washing machines.

Also, the Intel 80 core chip is not 80 x86 cores. If it were, it would most likely suck down the power you calculated. But a design consisting of 80 x86 cores on one die would not only be impractical, its probably infeasible too. Sheer size and heat would kill it even on the smallest processes.
 
Toytown said:
Whilst its a nice idea for severs in a datacenter and stuff like that, for my gaming computer i couldnt care how many watts it uses (in reason). It would be distratous for the GPU market if they had to holdback on performance to save a few watts.
Click to expand...
There's got to be a line somewhere, though, right? I mean, those power consumption figures on the new 2900XT are obscene, especially compared to Nvidia which seems to have better cards with lower power consumption.

It's one thing to say "energy efficiency be damned" if the hardware you're getting is actually top-of-the-line. The problem, even for gamers, is when even marginal improvements cause an increase in power consumption that is way out of proportion to the increased speed. Even if you have the headroom of a large power supply (700w or higher) and can thus physically support the increased power use, you're paying a lot more money for little to no advantage.
 
Im going to take the "tree-hugger" route here, I think PPW should be a semi-big concern to companys and the consumer. If you have ever been to a land fill, you how much waste humans truly generate in one day. I seriously question how the earth can support 6 billion of us, granted not everyone lives like we do but still, the waste we put out is sickening. Every step closer to more efficiency is a very good thing.
 
I don't necessarily agree with the author's point of the cards being "bad for the planet". The video card is probably only going to be cranking out 200+ watts a few hours a day, if even. Otherwise it will just be idle.

I do think the video chip companies could do a much better job improving performance-per-watt though. Just look at the dual- and quad-core CPU's coming out. The chips that have all of the cores on one die are far more efficient per-core than multiple individual cores. For instance, the AMD Dual Core chips only have about a 30% increase in power for adding another core (slightly under 100% increase in performance). That's a serious performance-per-watt improvement. I wonder why the video chip companies can't do the same?

Also, there are disadvantages to high-power video chips aside from just being "environmentally unfriendly". First, you need to buy a bigger power supply to handle the required load. Second, you potentially need to buy more cooling fans, and/or deal with the noise of video card heatsinks which blow the air directly out of the case. Third, you have to have multiple power connectors on each card. The latest cards have almost as many wires going to them as a mainboard. Meanwhile the trend with most other devices has been to use smaller cables which are easier to manage (SATA / SAS for instance). All of these things add to the cost of building a good computer in one way or another.

Of course, one could argue that you could just buy the more efficient lower-end cards. But it seems that these days, there is a huge margin of performance between the high-end and low-end. And some newer games barely even run on the best hardware available today.

CaptNumbNutz said:
IIRC the typical wall outlet in the US tops out around 1650-1800 watts (amps X volts).
Click to expand...

Typical home electrical sockets are 15 amp, which can push ~1700W before overloading. Keep in mind, however, that this 1700W is typically shared with all the rest of the devices in the room. What happens if you want to have 2 or 3 PCs for LAN play, but your video cards in one machine alone draw 500W? You will definitely overload the socket. And running 230V lines to every room, while viable for running a computer (all PSU's i've seen have the 115v / 230v switch on the back) would probably be too expensive for most people.
 
munkle said:
Im going to take the "tree-hugger" route here, I think PPW should be a semi-big concern to companys and the consumer. If you have ever been to a land fill, you see how much waste humans truly generate in one day. I seriously question how the earth can support 6 billion of us, granted not everyone lives like we do but still, the waste we put out is sickening. Every step closer to more efficiency is a very good thing.
Click to expand...
Fixed my statement in the quotes above, no edit is available.
 
Tree hugger isn't the best way to call anyone who wants environmental responsibility. Its an awfully generic and almost insulting way to make anyone talking about being environmentally repsonsible look as if they no point. Which really isn't the case. Its not about saving the planet, the planet is going to be just fine. We do have a repsonsbility in making sure the planet doesn't kill off the pests we are at some point, that is if we care at all about the future of the human race. This is just one particular issue, but we do have to face it on every level to some degree. I know I shouldn't soapbox that.. now on to the point on all of this that both sides of this can agree on. I know I'm tired of the rushed products with piss poor design that waste electricity just to get the thing on the market. I'll put some money on the fact that the next generation nvidia card will probably come in at a lower pricepoint than the flagship 8800 at the time, and will be faster + consume less power. Nvidia is sitting on their design to milk the previous product which isn't nearly as efficent. Yeah, its all guestimation I suppose, but we'll see. Not to pick on nvidia, its just an example of the industry as a whole. If you're ati, you suck at it period.
 
I think it's reasonable to expect that a performance video card is going to draw considerably more power than a typical desktop model, but that doesn't excuse it for not running efficiently. I'm passing on the current generation of GPUs in the hope that 65nm or smaller dies help bring the power consumption under control.

Every component maker's motto should be: Performance where it's needed, efficienct by default.
 
PPW is extremely important for all but the max OC crowd. I want a PC I can use w/o having to go wet & w/o a need for a degree in HVAC. YMWV.
 
You guys really don't like Bit-tech, do you? This is the 2nd article in a week where you have laughed at/slammed them flat out. Ah, arrogance is bliss.

Personally, I don't care how much juice it absorbes, so long as it kicks @ss(like a '68 Camaro gets good gas milage).
 
As mentioned above ~1400W (assuming 80% efficiency) is all you are going to get out of a power supply (1500W is a possibility, anything highers is BS/ratings games). Not only that, but if you get anywhere close to that, forget plugging in your monitor and laser printer on the same breaker line (you have more than one circuit in that room, don't you). HardOCP has already reviewed power supplies at this level.

Anybody run a few quick calculations to see the cost of the R600 over time? My guess is that if you plan on keeping it for a year, the extra power draw will wipe out the difference between it and a 8800GTX (but not 2x8800GTS-SLI). I'd like to see some sort of cost breakouts for those of us not living in our parents basement.

One final note, the last time I was in Canada (long, long, ago), the electricity was dirt cheap. I wonder if ATI simply has different ideas about power than the silicon valley and its rolling blackouts.

Wumpus
 
I could care less about performance per watt.
Click to expand...
for my gaming computer i couldnt care how many watts it uses (in reason)
Click to expand...
I would make more quote but i think anyone with a mind would get the a sense of the general direction. If you all don't care about the PPW and by extension are willing to consume more energy, try figure out some way of keeping the environment waste generated to yourself. While your at it stop driving those V8s and raid other people country's for oil.
 
PPW is not important when you are looking at a performance machine. If we were looking at a server or something along that magnitude, sure.
I think it's nice to know how much power a video card consumes, but I don't need a stinking graph and comparisons.
 
Two things.

One: power used by a computer is not necessarily wasted. Every bit of it, virtually 100%, is turned into heat. If it's cold outside, this is performing the highly useful function of heating your home. My heat is on at least 80% of the year, and I have electric baseboard heat anyway, so my computer uses up zero electricity. I'm simply heating the room partially with the computer, rather than with the electric baseboard heater which is 1 foot away from the computer.

Two: If some company invented a startrek type holodeck, which I could buy for $1000 and have in my home but which would suck down 5 kilowatts of power, I would buy it in a second, and so would you all. Sure, we'd have to build thousands of new coal and nuclear power plants across the planet to power all these millions of holodecks, but, god damn, would it be cool. It would be worth it. Totally.
 
I think the Bit-tech commentary was spot-on. Most "main-stream" dual-core CPUs are rated around 65W nowadays--that's the same as my old Athlon XP 1800. But video cards are getting out of hand. You used to be able to buy video cards that didn't even require any heatsink of any sort. Looking at newegg, the least-expensive video card, made with the now-5-generations-old Radeon 7000 GPU, has a heatsink on the die.

One aspect that hasn't been discussed yet is noise. I like my computers as close to silent as possible, but I still want decent performance. That's not a problem for CPU cooling, but it is becoming more and more difficult on the GPU side.
 
Wumpus said:
As mentioned above ~1400W (assuming 80% efficiency) is all you are going to get out of a power supply (1500W is a possibility, anything highers is BS/ratings games). Not only that, but if you get anywhere close to that, forget plugging in your monitor and laser printer on the same breaker line (you have more than one circuit in that room, don't you). HardOCP has already reviewed power supplies at this level.
Click to expand...

Actually it is kind of funny but I run those tests with the power supplies off a dedicated 20A circuit. Weird house wiring left one 20A on one outlet. The rest of the test equipment is connected to a different 20A circuit. It should be noted though that while rated at 15A or 20A those figures are peak values on those circuits.
 
Mohonri said:
I think the Bit-tech commentary was spot-on. Most "main-stream" dual-core CPUs are rated around 65W nowadays--that's the same as my old Athlon XP 1800. But video cards are getting out of hand. You used to be able to buy video cards that didn't even require any heatsink of any sort. Looking at newegg, the least-expensive video card, made with the now-5-generations-old Radeon 7000 GPU, has a heatsink on the die.
Click to expand...

Video cards are getting out of hand because gamers want the most powerful graphics card they can afford. If Nvidia came out with some new card that was weaker than what everyone wanted but used up little electricity, no one would buy it. I mean, we already have that, it's called onboard graphics, it uses up almost no power and requires no extra cooling and it's practically free. But we're not about to throw away our $300 video cards and play 5 year old games using onboard graphics.

We want powerful graphics processing, we want the latest coolest games, we're drooling over the upcoming Crysis engine, and we're willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the hardware needed to run it. We might as well drop the b.s. and not even pretend to ask for hardware which doesn't use much electricity, cause none of us would buy that weak crap anyway.
 
meme said:
Two things.

One: power used by a computer is not necessarily wasted. Every bit of it, virtually 100%, is turned into heat. If it's cold outside, this is performing the highly useful function of heating your home. My heat is on at least 80% of the year, and I have electric baseboard heat anyway, so my computer uses up zero electricity. I'm simply heating the room partially with the computer, rather than with the electric baseboard heater which is 1 foot away from the computer.
Click to expand...

What happens in the summer? The a large % of the world tends to not have their heat on as much as you. Taking an example of yourself and expanding it to everyone rarely works well.
 
munkle said:
Im going to take the "tree-hugger" route here, I think PPW should be a semi-big concern to companys and the consumer. If you have ever been to a land fill, you how much waste humans truly generate in one day. I seriously question how the earth can support 6 billion of us, granted not everyone lives like we do but still, the waste we put out is sickening. Every step closer to more efficiency is a very good thing.
Click to expand...

You do realize that one Volcano eruption(which isn't man-made the last time I checked)shoots more pollutants into the air, also destroys more land(while creating new land as LAVA cools), than we as humans could ever possibly imagine doing right?

Your mindset is the same thinking that has the UN banning western companies from sending farming technology into areas of Africa to help the poor Africans farm more effeciently, because farming destroyes the environment, so let them starve...

The Earth has been around for 5 billion years, man has exists for about 45,000 years, when it wants to get rid of us humans it will do it on it's own terms..

Think massive earthquakes(again not man-made), causing huge tsunami's, or huge volcano eruptions, throw in a few hurricanes just for good measure.
 
Typically American responses. "I don't care so long as I get what I want". When did it become cool to be self centered? :rolleyes:
 
steeltoe said:
Typically American responses. "I don't care so long as I get what I want". When did it become cool to be self centered? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Hey, don't dump all Americans together with the idiots. How would you like it if someone posted: All <your nationality> likes to do is make simple generalizations.
 
Where do they single out HardOCP, Kyle ? I don't think you have to take it so childishly like a direct critcism of your site when they suggest that there is a need for change in the general review methodology. The vast majority of sites don't put too much weight into the PPW metric.

Shouldn't you be posting this article in a positive light since they agree with you?
 
Annoying edit check: maybe the link shouldn't read "...use of Performance pet Watt..."

I don't have a pet Watt, do you? :D

OK, enough petty spellchecks, I'm not interested in PPW "for the planet" or for the children or for Al Gore's indulgences, er, carbon credits, whichever. We could (save for anti-everything luddites) build nuke plants and power whatever with great efficiency.

PPW is meaningful because I pay my own electric bill :) and I'd prefer quieter computers so that I can find ways to make my next machine a HTPC (aka excuse to use HDTV for gaming). Hey, honey, look, the PC can be your DVR...
 
OMG, the freaking energy nazis strike again.lol do you guys at the [H] like stroking yourselves over the fact of "perforamance per watt" Go hug a tree.......lol I buy a PC to be FAST, not consume less energy, lol

who guys a performance car to conserve energy? that's right no one......

if you are so concerned about enegery, why not make your stuff run on solar energy?.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
OMG, the freaking energy nazis strike again.lol do you guys at the [H] like stroking yourselves over the fact of "perforamance per watt" Go hug a tree.......lol I buy a PC to be FAST, not consume less energy, lol

who guys a performance car to conserve energy? that's right no one......

if you are so concerned about enegery, why not make your stuff run on solar energy?.
Click to expand...

I hope that was sarcasm.
 
To be quite honest the power requirements of performance PCs got really ridiculous about the time we went past the 500W level. Whilst every other home electronics device is getting less power hungry PCs continue to grow more power hungry. The comments about "tree huggers" and "performance cars" are absolutely ridiculous. Sure, you expect to use a bit more fuel in a performance car, buut at the same time you wouldn't expect it to suck down fuel in the same way as a quarter mile dragster, would you? That'd be ridiculous. In comparison to 'real people' only nutters run those things!


Compare the PC to other appliances in your living area. That home theatre amplifier only sucks down about 100 watts or thereabouts. It does shitloads more than older, more power hungry ones did! Even if you have a bigass backlit TV it'll only suck up about 250 watts. PCs have moved into the realms of the outlandish!
 
I am very interested in performance per watt.

I have switched my openbsd routers to via-mini-itx boxes although I still run a dual opteron285 as my main desktop. I also have 2 dual opterons (powered off as I am not using them), 2 pentium d 805's (only one as a phone server, which I may convert to another via mini-itx also) and assorted other boxes.

However, on the other hand, how many of these ppw people use scooters, motorcycles, bicycling or public transportation to get around instead of v8's, SUV's, etc ?
 
Wumpus said:
I'd like to see some sort of cost breakouts for those of us not living in our parents basement.


One final note, the last time I was in Canada (long, long, ago), the electricity was dirt cheap. I wonder if ATI simply has different ideas about power than the silicon valley and its rolling blackouts.

Wumpus
Click to expand...

No kidding,as would I like to see it ! And yes I think ATI has a far removed from reality view on power consumption.
 
I like what bit-tech.net is thinking. At the current trend, 10 years from now, things may be 100x faster and 80x hotter, and though performance per watt has increased, performance per watt as we know it needs to be rethunk.
 
jhtrico1850 said:
I like what bit-tech.net is thinking. At the current trend, 10 years from now, things may be 100x faster and 80x hotter, and though performance per watt has increased, performance per watt as we know it needs to be rethunk.
Click to expand...

Um, the 2900XT can burn through slightly over 200W. That means that if they try to run more that 8x hotter (heat production, not temperature) they will blow the breaker. That also doesn't leave any room for the CPU, hard drives, or motherboard (plug the monitor and printer into another socket). They could crank it up by a factor of 3, have enough room for crossfire, a motherboard with a mobile CPU, top of the line power supply, and monitor and printer plugged into a separate line. They would also get creamed by a quadro system from Nvidia, provided it used reasonable amounts of power.

If it isn't obvious, this trend can't continue or these boards will become even more exclusive (to fanatics willing to rewire the house to run benchmarks). The need for performance per watt didn't come from Al Gore, it comes from the laws of physics combined with Moore's law.

Wumpus
 
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