How a chill-pill for your server room improves your bottom line

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3rd time is a charm

The StrongARM processor was the first chip to be engineered to use less power. Although Mr. Ellison's network computer never flew, the last of the Apple Newtons were fantastic devices! Its a testament to ARM's design that InHell decided to keep it, rather than replace it with some crappy x86 technology. The Xscale (as StrongArm is now called) is an excellent low power chip - why not put THAT into blades (answer - no floating point unit).

The best low-power chip to date was the Transmeta Crusoe. This technological marvel was the pinacle of Linus Torvald's accomplishements. Its too bad that Transmeta took so long, and had few financial backers for this chip to be a success. Maybe the InHell monopoly rolled these guys up - we'll probably never know . . .

The Pentium-M was low power AND low performance! Take a stock 3Ghz chip and run it at 1.4 Ghz - and guess what, its uses less power! WOW! What a concept! Yes, that's an oversimplified explanation, but essentially true - if you run a Pentium-M at 3.6 Ghz (which it should be capable of), it will drain just about as many watts as your "typical" home PC (maybe a tad less). The Pentium-M is more about finding the happy medium where the power vs speed graph is optimal. Much of the power-consumption savings with P-M is with idling the chip when its not needed - something that constantly-pounded servers would never use. So if you think you're going to save big by using these new processors, maybe you should think again.

Posted by: Roger Ramjet   Posted on: 07/29/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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