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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer who wrote (51055)	2/26/1999 1:33:00 PM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572276

Elmer, <I didn't write ohm's law, go argue with him.> Sure you didn't discover the Ohm or any other laws due to apparent lack of analytical and thinking abilities. The Ohm law is valid for homogeneous piece of conductive media. A processor consumes the electric power via switching of millions of gates under strict control of the program it is running. It is hardly a simple piece of conductor, and the effective processor "conductivity" is a complex function of a program. If it executes a HALT command as Windows NT frequently does when idling, the processor consumes almost no power. If it crunches frequently alternating data pattens across FPU or alike, it may consume power in some excess of average power consumption. If the max current ever happen in any real program, it seldom happen for more than a few microseconds out of the total run-time of the application. Hence there is a term "typical" power consumption, which is much less than the "maximum current" times max voltage. However, a CPU manufacturer MUST specify the max.current because if the power supply fails to provide this PEAK current for those rare and short periods of time, the core voltage may drop below the level of safe operation, and the program may encounter a data error, or the overall test may fail or an application lock-up may occur. All this whinning about "excessive consumption" of 0.25um K6 processors is no more than nonsense, and you know this perfectly. This subject was discussed at length here when AMD introduced K6-233 in 0.35um, and the consumed power was even higher than the current 0.25um K6. Pentiums-II at 300MHz on early 0.35 um process consumed even more power, up to 40W on average, and the PC industry has had some problems with overall heat buil-up in some poorly ventillated cases. So what? BTW, have you seen the size of this Xeon heat sink? developer.intel.com Now please shut up about this subject.