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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles R who wrote (103455)	10/22/2003 12:13:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 275872

Chuck, You are on to something here. Someone who has access to AMD marketing should feed this stuff to them and ask them to consider making Cool'N'quiet mandatory on all desktops. I think this will be a major selling point, more so if Prescott flavor of P4 continues to lack this feature. None (not even laptops) have had this feature - of adapting clock speed (and corresponding voltages) based on load. Intel finally managed to copy this feature from AMd in their Banias / Celerino processors. I wonder if the Netburst / Fireball / P4 / P68 core is headed to a dead end. I would like to see more info from AMD on Cool'N'Quiet, especially how they deal with infinitesimally small bursts of demand. Also, more info is needed on the power consumption. If my understanding (and the numbers given by AMD are correct), then in the lowest state (800MHz, 1.3V), the desktop CPU consumes 35Watts of power. But what does this mean? I think it means that when the CPU is forced into this mode (it is prevented from jumping to higher multiplier), for example, in power settings of Windows 2000 /XP it is called "Max battery", in my opinion it means that that is the TDP if fully utilized, which is fairly rare. Typing this message, the CPU usage would be close to zero even on Athlon64 3200 in 800 MHz mode, so the actual power consumption may be a fraction of 35 Watts. With a properly engineered systems, with adaptive fan speeds of Power Supply, chasis, CPU, Athlon 64 based CPUs should be nearly silent. Ok, this is the "good". The bad and the ugly is that few if any mobos have functioning Cool'N'Quied (=CNQ), you need to have the right CPU (Opteron and AthlonFX don't support the power saving features yet). I hope this gets fixed shortly, especially on the Opteron side. Silent servers is something that IT crowd would definitely welcome. My guess is that if someone did a study of all the servers in the world and calculated their CPU utilization, we would get a value between 0 and 1%. This means that Opteron servers with fully enabled power saving features could run almost silently, generating very little heat. As far as making it mandatory, I hope AMD does it at some point. Socket 939 sounds like a good cut-off point, and from that point, only 754 motherboards supporting CNQ would get on the recommended list. At minimum, AMD should indicate level of support for CNQ on this page: www2.amd.com^9461~73649,00.html Joe