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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wily who wrote (4527)	7/18/1999 10:21:00 AM
From: PMS Witch	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 110635

But PW, what is my computer doing when it's on standby? Seems like nothing ... Interesting question! The chip guys could jump in here and help us out. When your computer is doing something the chips are active. Most chips either switch or store. Since stored stuff needs refreshing, (The 'D' in DRAM) the question logically follows "What happens to the stale stuff?" It gets turned into heat as electrons 'leak' away. Also, when things change, the 'old' is discarded, and again, the discarding process produces heat. When chips switch, the same thing happens: The old 'state' gets discarded in favour of the new, resulting in electrical energy becoming heat. Any 'powerful' chip does plenty of work, resulting in plenty of discards, leading to plenty of 'replacement' electrons moving about. This movement, defined as 'current' produces heat: and lots of it in modern CPUs! Now, on standby, the chips are only maintaining their status. Yes, DRAM still gets refreshed, but there's little discarding going on. The CPU, and it's (static) memory are also not changing state so there is little electrical, and hence thermal, load on the system. A small amount of heat is generated by the disk spinning. Actually, at full speed, the disk consumes much less electricity than it would if it were accelerating to speed from a standstill. (The inductance load is optimal at full speed.) System designers must consider the tradeoff between the wasted electricity of leaving a disk running and the extra consumption of electricity in re-starting it. Again, I'm sure managing the power requirements has more to do with thermal considerations inside the box than the cost of the few megawatts a desktop PC could consume. Cheerios, PW. P.S. I've tried to explain things so that everyday people can see what's happening. If technical people feel I've messed up, please post the corrections so we all can learn. Thanks, PW.