>>I'm having a hard time following their math
Posted on 12/09/2005 2:01:26 PM PST by Lets Roll NOW
Intel making better desktop chips than AMD? Bah! AMD is wiping the floor with Intel in the desktop chip segment right now and has been for a while now.
True, but not in terms of power consumed per performance. The link shows a semi-log plot.
On the steep end of the AMD curve performance went from 500 to 3000 Mhz, a six-fold increase, while power went up from 60 to 90 watts, a 0.5-fold increase. IOW performance went up 12 times faster than power consumption.
Computers require highly refined energy. To get the refined energy "noise" is stripped away as heat. This is a good thing because the refined energy can do more things and is therefore more valuable. I urge all Freeper to read the book The Bottomless Well for more details on the energy economy and the impact computers and the Internet have on it.
Their architecture probably requires massive parallel processing and would have been too cost prohibitive to employ modern PCs.
They should look into the PC104 form factor boards like the one used at Sandia labs (ASCI Red) that I was lucky enough to see up close, although now dated.
Well, yes, but...
I was at what was then the Compaq technical conference in Houston when Bill Gates made the astounding boast that they had finally shut down their last non-PC servers, the 16 AS400s that ran Microsoft's accounting systems, and they had replaced them with 1600 Compaq servers.
that's one thousand six hundred servers needed to replace sixteen AS400s.
Almost all of us in the room mumbled "this is a good thing?"
Given the amount of heat the north/south bridge chips put off some of that power per watt metric has simply been distributed across the motherboard and is not reflected in the chart. With higher memory bus speeds memory is beginning to consume more power as well.
Just about every component in a modern PC has increased in performance and as a result the overall power consumption requirement has followed along. The overall system power requirement is definately increasing. While the performance per watt of CPU's may have gradually increased, the amount power for the components to support the CPU has increase significantly.
Plus the power to run all the AC it required to cool all that stuff down....
Sure, but the timeframe specified was the last 3 generations of Googles infrastructure. That's probably no more than 5 years, so his observation is undoubtedly correct for what he's observing in his environment, just as what you say is correct in your experience.
I know that power and heat dissapation are higher in my attention than they have been in the past for installations I'm working on.
All those Google servers could have giant hand cranks, and all the Google engineers could have a go at turning the crank!
They might be better off buying a couple 1000 XBox 360's since Microsoft sells them at a loss. The specs are impressive, although I don't know the power requirements involved.
Too bad that as hardware gets faster, software gets slower to compensate.
Quantum mechanical probability in action!
That actually isn't too far off. Working backwards,
(Actually, I'm guessing Intel could pour on the heat and come out with something in late 2008 if they had to....)
That puts your typical server in <$250/year for energy. Your average hard disk costs about 10x its annual energy costs to operate when heavily used. I'm having a hard time following their math.
Google uses scads of cheap 1U servers with a couple cheap disks. Pure bang for the buck, make up for it in quantity.
At our library,
they have about three dozen
PCs for patrons.
They're all networked, BUT
when anything's updated,
the tech support geek
must walk to each box
and update each one itself.
Minis were a breeze.
That's not exactly
the article's point. It says
Intel is better
at low power chips,
with a wider selection
of chips in that realm.
And it suggested
Jobs may position Apple
to focus products
in the low voltage
domain. That is cool with me.
I hate wall sockets.
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