March 26th, 2008

55W PC power supply powering the dual-core computer

Posted by George Ou @ 12:35 am

Categories: Build it yourself, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Networking, Security

Tags: Dual-core, PC, Power Supply, Computer, George Ou

Most computer builders in the world think I’m nuts for endorsing the use of 330 watt power supplies for a high-end performance computer.  Conventional “wisdom” says that anything under 500 watts is inadequate for an enthusiast PC.  “My power supply is bigger than your power supply” seems to be a typical mindset for many people but I’ve always had just the opposite desire to say that “my supply is smaller than yours and it works great”.  So when I started building mainstream dual-core computers with 220 watt 80 Plus power supplies, people were shocked that I would even consider such a small power supply.  But since I was able to build a 50W peak power dual-core computer, why not use an even smaller power supply in the sub-100 watt range?

Pictured above is the open frame fanless AC input open frame 55 watt FSP055-50LM power supply from Sparkle Power Inc with an MSRP of $39.  Typically when power supplies are this small, people often use DC input power supplies with an external AC brick.  Not so with this model as it’s an all in one with the standard AC power connector you get on a normal ATX PC power supply.  It’s so small that it doesn’t even bother with a fan or metal casing; you have to a system-level fan yourself and provide the bracing and shielding in your computer chassis.  The really nice thing about this solution is that the entire power supply including the AC conversion part is not much bigger than a DC power supply but you don’t need an external brick.

Using this 55W power supply, I took a dual-core Intel E2140 along with the bundled ECS945-GM motherboard I bought for $90 and built a computer with it using default clock speed and voltages.  Unfortunately since it was missing a 4-pin power connector for the motherboard, I had to hot-wire a 4-pin CPU power connector from an older power supply to this unit to make it work.  That means 2 12-volt yellow cables and 2 black ground cables had to be soldered in to place and taped up.  Since these cables are safe for 10 amps each which translates to 120 watts per cable, I’m not even close to overloading the cables.

Once the computer came up, the power consumption at the plug peak out at 70W which means the output power is around 52W at 75% efficiency which is 3W under the peak output of the power supply.  That is cutting it a bit close but it shows the extreme worst-case of what this PSU can handle.

In reality, the 55W PSU isn’t practical for a mainstream dual-core computer although it would be more than powerful enough for an Intel D201GLY with Celeron 115, D201GLY2 motherboard with Celeron 120, or the Via low-power ITX platforms. The upcoming Intel Centrino Atom platform with the Atom-Diamondville CPU peaks at around 4W TDP so they’re even easier to power.

The bottom line is that this is a nice little power supply for small embedded solutions but you’ll want to stick with the bigger 80 Plus closed-frame models like the Sparkle SPI220LE 220W or the SPI270LE 270W if you’re building a mainstream PC.  Note that the SPI models are 1U power supplies so you’ll either need a very custom case or one that uses 1.75″ thin power supplies.

March 10th, 2008

Early photos of AMD Shanghai CPU

Posted by George Ou @ 5:18 am

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, Processors, Servers

Tags: Shanghai, Photograph, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., CPU, Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, George Ou

Credit: Fuad Abazovic, Fudzilla

Photos of CPU-Z highlighting AMD’s 45nm Shanghai quad-core processor appeared on Fudzilla last week.  It confirms that AMD’s latest processor will have a total of 2 megabytes L2 cache (512 KB per core), and 6 megabytes of shared L3 cache.

By contrast, AMD’s 65-nm Barcelona-class processors (Phenom and Opteron quad-core) only have 2 megabytes of shared L3 cache.  The L2 and L3 caches will mostly be exclusive which means they will for the most part not share any content effectively making the cache size larger.

Shanghai’s core voltage of 1.15 V is equivalent to the low-voltage edition of AMD’s current 65nm quad-core processor Barcelona though it’s unclear if this particular Shanghai was operating at normal or low voltage.  According to Fuad Abazovic of Fudzilla, Shanghai is expected to operate above the 3 GHz mark though the CPU-Z photo has the clock speed left out.  We also need to put this in the context of Barcelona having a targeted clock speed of 2.8 GHz according to papers presented at ISSCC 2007 though actual production speeds have yet to exceed 2.3 GHz.

One other interesting note is that AMD’s Montreal 8-core processor due out after Shanghai will resort to MCM (Multi Chip Module).  Montreal will be two Shanghai cores glued on to a single processor package.  That means AMD will be adopting the same strategy Intel has been using on its 65nm and first-generation 45nm processors where you take two smaller cores and “glue” them on to a CPU package to have more cores per processor.  Ironically, Intel will be going the opposite direction starting with Intel Nehalem.  Not only will the initial Nehalem-EP 8 MB L3 cache quad-core processor be single-die, but even the much larger Nehalem-EX 8-core processor with 24 MB L3 cache will be single-die.  So in 2009, watch for both companies to reverse their marketing literature touting or disparaging MCM “glue” technology.

March 7th, 2008

Asus' 8.9" Eee draws crowds at CeBIT

Posted by George Ou @ 12:57 am

Categories: Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Linux, Microsoft, Mobile/Wireless, News, Video Conferencing

Tags: ASUS, Webcam, CeBit, Bottom Line, Flash Memory, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows XP, Linux, Operating Systems, Software

Here in CeBIT 2008, crowds descended on Hannover Germany to see the latest technologies. Germany is certainly a lovely country but there’s nothing lovable about the 5.60 Euro per gallon gas prices.

CeBIT is certainly one of the more unique conventions I’ve been to since everything is spread out over a square kilometer and it’s like going to 10 mini conventions. While you get some outdoor air between the halls, don’t expect any fresh air with all the smokers there. The temperature delta certainly makes proper attire a challenge because it’s too warm inside and freezing outside.

Asus had a massive presence in building 26 which is one of the more popular spots at CeBIT and they managed to draw crowds wanting to get a closer look at the new and improved 8.9″ Asus Eee PC. The new 8.9″ Asus Eee comes with more SSD flash storage, a bigger LCD screen with 1024×600 resolution, a better quality webcam. The same Pentium M 900 MHz CPU is the same as the original Eee. [See gallery for a close-up view.]

The Windows XP model comes with 8 GBs of SSD flash memory when the Linux model comes with 12 GB of SSD flash memory. So far we only know that the price will be 399 Euros (which typically means it will be fewer in dollars for the US market), but we don’t know if there will be a price difference between the Linux and Windows XP model. It is possible that the price of the flash memory offsets the licensing costs of Windows XP.While holding the lightweight Eee with one hand, I tested the quality of the Mic and the Webcam and confirmed that the quality if fairly good. The Webcam is definitely much better quality than the old Eee. The Eee also comes with a wired 10/100 Ethernet port as well as 802.11g. The one down side to the Eee is that it doesn’t have a DVI output and instead has a DB-15 VGA port.

Here’s a comparison of the older 7″ Asus Eee versus the 8.9″ Eee. As you can see, the screen is much bigger and the color and contrast appears to be much better. The speakers had to be moved to the bottom of the laptop because the bigger screen pushed them off the lid. You can also see that the track pad is also larger.

I wouldn’t doubt if people buy the 12 GB Linux version and use NLite to install a trimmed down version of XP though having Linux on this device is extremely useful if you’re going to use it as a security auditing tool. The 8 GBs of SSD is more than enough to hold the OS and key applications and a $60 16 GB SDHC card is more than sufficient to hold plenty of movies and data. With the larger screen and nicer webcam and adequate microphone, it becomes a great Skype video conferencing solution. The bottom line is that the Asus Eee is very pleasing in the hands and it runs Windows XP very quickly if you keep bloatware/crapware off of it.

March 2nd, 2008

Intel christens Silverthorne as "Atom"

Posted by George Ou @ 9:02 pm

Categories: Build it yourself, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors, Servers, Storage, Virtualization

Tags: Anandtech, Intel Corp., Silverthorne, Atom Logo, Intel D201GLY2, Processors, Chipsets, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components

Intel has officially announced its new branding for the “Silverthorne” processor and the “Menlow” platform.  The Silverthorne processor will be called the “Intel Atom”.  The Menlow platform will be called “Intel Centrino Atom”.  The Intel Atom processor will be used in the Intel Centrino Atom platform.  The new Atom logos are shown below.

Intel released technical details of the new Silverthorne processor last month at ISSCC 2008.  This latest announcement gives Silverthorne and Menlow their official branding and their official logos.  Intel also released high resolution die shots at the right hand side of their press release.  A cut down rotated version of the die shot is shown below.

Here’s a summary of the new “Atom” processor:

• Equivalent on single-threaded performance to original Pentium M “Banias” processor.  Faster if SSE3 instructions are used in the application or if multiple threads are involved.
• 0.6W TDP (Thermal Design Power) to 2.5W TDP
• Up to 1.8 GHz and DailyTech says sources inside Intel are saying that the 500 MHz version goes down to 0.6W TDP.
• Idle power consumption can drop as low as 0.01W to 0.1W
• Deep power down C6 state
• Optimized register-file and cache 6T bits cells
• CMOS mode on quad-pumped FSB IO
• Split IO power supply
• Single CPU core 2-issue in-order pipeline
• SMT (Symmetric Multithread) architecture
• 25mm^2 die size (2500 CPUs per 300mm diameter wafer)
• Can achieve 2GHz core frequencies at 1.0V
• Intel VT (Virtualization Technology)
• Intel 64 architecture (formerly EM64T and compatible with AMD64)

Intel’s press release also mentions the processor codenamed “Diamondville”.  DailyTech reported some leaked information that Diamondville would be released in a single and dual-core version at 4W and 8W TDP.  Diamondville will be soldered on to an Intel 945GSE chipset motherboard and judging from the photo, it looks to be a replacement for the D201GLY and D201GLY2 developing market platforms.  The Intel D201GLY2 uses a lower power Celeron 220 (Core Solo architecture) with a TDP of 17W so Diamondville is a huge boost in energy efficiency.  The current D201GLY and D201GLY2 also utilizes a third party SIS chipset which doesn’t support S3 sleep/suspend states while the Diamondville 945GSE platform will.

Given the fact that it’s highly unlikely (too expensive) that Intel would design a whole separate CPU for this type of a solution, it is very possible that Diamondville is simply a soldered-on-motherboard derivative of Silverthorne and the dual-core version is simply an MCM (Multi Chip Module) version of Silverthorne.  AnandTech’s Anand Lal Shimpi seems to agree with this theory and goes on to explain that the slightly higher TDP with slightly lower 1.6 GHz clock is simply due to a higher voltage allowing for much higher yields.  Since this is for the low-cost value market segment, that theory makes a lot of sense.

At present time Intel seems to be hinting that Diamondville will also carry the “Atom” branding but they’re vague on the specifics.  What is certain is that the emerging market will enter in to a whole new level of energy efficiency and the appliance/embedded do-it-yourselfers like me are drooling over Diamondville’s power specifications.

February 19th, 2008

Cracking open a Toshiba HD-A30 HD DVD player

Posted by George Ou @ 2:46 am

Categories: Consumer electronics, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Storage

Tags: HD-DVD, Consensus, Toshiba Corp., Toshiba HD-A30, Hd Dvd, DVD, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, George Ou

Updated 3:00AM - By now the news is out that the end of HD DVD might be near since Toshiba is considering its options that may include the possibility of stopped production on HD DVD products is confirmed dead.  There are more than a million HD DVD owners, two exclusive HD DVD studios, and the adult movie industry who are now left holding the bag on an optical disk format with no future.

While it may be a sad day that the more affordable and fully-baked format lost, I know many friends who bought one of these sub-$150 players as a great 1080i or 1080p up-converting DVD player which happen to come with 7 HD DVD movies.  A common consensus is that while Blu-ray may have “won” the format wars, a lot of people aren’t in the mood to jump over to the $300 Blu-ray set-top boxes that can’t be upgraded to Blu-ray profile 2.0 next year and they’ll be left with another obsolete high definition player.

Since I have the opportunity to review my friend’s Toshiba HD-A30 which is the pinnacle of HD DVD set-top boxes and might be the last production HD DVD drive ever, I thought I’d crack it open and take a look inside.  See higher resolution gallery here.

This $150 1080p up-converting HD DVD player comes with 2 HD DVD movies (300 and Borne Identity) out of the box.  It also has a coupon offer for an additional 5 free HD DVD movies.  Given the fact that a discount HD DVD movie goes for $15 while the newer ones are $25, this seems to be worth at least $105 in HD DVD movies.  The fact that existing DVDs look great on it when played on a 1080i or 1080p display seems to be a nice bonus.

Just what we need, another remote control to add to my collection of dozens of remote controls.  This remote seems to be a simple and straight forward infrared remote with no backlighting and it works well enough.  The menus in the HD DVD titles are fairly responsive and they work and overlay the main feature while the movie is playing.

Here’s the Toshiba HD-A30 unit sitting on a table and it’s fairly small and light weight.  I measured idle power consumption to be around 22 watts and peak consumption around 28 watts during HD DVD playback which is a vast improvement over the first generation HD DVD players which consumed around 60 to 80 watts.  Boot times still seem a bit disappointing at one minute long and there’s no low-power sleep state with instant wake but this seems to be a problem with the Blu-ray set-top boxes as well.

After popping off a few screws on the Toshiba HD-A30, the cover came off.  You can also see what the back looks like.  It comes with an RCA audio/video standard definition output, an HDMI HDCP output, an analog component HD output, and a S/PDIF digital audio output.  The Ethernet port is standard on all HD DVD players for future upgradeability and interactive features.

Here’s a topside view of the Toshiba HD-A30 with the covers off.  It’s a fairly simple device with an embedded motherboard with CPU and graphics processors on the right, an HD DVD ROM drive on the left, and an open frame power supply on the lower left.  The very first Toshiba HD DVD drive used a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor while this one uses something that has much lower power consumption with passive cooling.  Since the CPU heat sink was glued on, I didn’t want to rip it off and damage my friend’s unit so I didn’t see what the chip was.  The memory, GPU, and CPU are all soldered directly on to the motherboard.  In theory, this would make a decent $150 media extender that hooks up to any high-definition monitor if we could put in a hacked operating system.  In theory it could be turned in to a computer but it lacks USB ports for hooking up input devices.

The Toshiba HD-A30 seems to be using a miniature 40-pin PATA IDE connector for the optical drive and a small 3.5″ floppy drive power connector.  You can see the thin 40-pin ribbon taped down to the chassis.

This is a close-up of the motherboard.

February 15th, 2008

The $330 IPCop/Copfilter firewall 25 watt appliance

Posted by George Ou @ 4:42 am

Categories: Build it yourself, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Networking, Servers, Via

Tags: Appliance, Firewall, Hard Drive, Memory, Networking, George Ou

A lot of you probably already know my disdain for desktop anti-virus because of how sluggish it makes your computer and how it actually becomes more of a liability in terms of security. I’ve talked about how wonderful it would be if you could run your anti-virus at the gateway to protect all of your computers. The one thing I couldn’t really offer up until recently is how you actually implement this with a practical and relatively cheap solution.

One of the things a lot of people did was to take an old computer that made a lot of noise and probably takes a lot of power which adds up on the electricity bill. Another option was to buy a $600 embedded appliance which is too expensive. The third option which Justin James attempted was to order something all the way from China which took nearly 2 months along with a steep money transfer fee and shipping costs. I got so desperate that I even thought the Apple TV would make a nice low-power cheap appliance only to find out that the EFI BIOS was going to be a pain to deal with.

A year has passed and I’m happy to inform you that the bad old days are over and you can finally buy a low-cost low-powered x86 appliance for a little over $330 with no gimmicks or hacks. Enter Logic Supply’s Perimeter B4 appliance for $291 which includes 3 gigabit ports and 1 FastEthernet port as shown in the picture above and below which I got a chance to review. It’s an all metal chassis that can be mounted on the wall or just placed in the corner somewhere. [See gallery for a closer look.]

This particular model came with a 2.5″ hard drive and 512 MB RAM, but the current model being sold only has 256 MB RAM and 256 MB flash. I’m not sure why they no longer offer the hard drive and more memory option on their website but you might be able to custom order it. If not, you can buy 512 MB of DDR2-533 memory for $9 including shipping and a 20 GB 2.5″ hard drive for $29 including shipping. This is the recommended amount of memory you’ll need for running IPCop/Copfilter and the hard drive is perfect for transparent caching which speeds things up immensely. If you spend $14.38 including shipping for 1 GB of RAM, that would give you more room to grow.

The noise level in this device is moderate with the three small fans inside (1 for CPU and 2 for chassis). It’s a lot quieter than your 1U Cisco switch or router and quieter than some PCs, but it’s no silent enough for under-desk operation in my opinion and you might have to make some modifications to the fan to slow them down. You can generally replace the yellow wire leading up to the fan with the red wire which cuts the voltage from 12 to 5 volts and that will significantly slow down the fan. The temperature seemed to be low enough that you could reduce the speed of the fan. I did complain to Logic Supply that they should implement variable speed fans that only speed up and make noise when the system is getting too hot.

Inside the chassis you’ll find a standard mini-ITX Jetway J7F2WE-1G motherboard with 1 GHz Via C7 processor which is plenty of performance for a gateway device like this. Typical power consumption was around 25W so it should cost about $22 a year to operate 24×7 at 10 cents per kilowatt*hour.

Here I detached the hard drive and the Gigabit Ethernet daughter card. The hard drive is a standard 2.5″ PATA IDE hard drive mounted on a metal holder. There is only one DDR2-533 slot for memory so make sure you buy enough memory.

The system comes with a 10/100 FastEthernet interface on the motherboard and a 3-port gigabit Ethernet card which uses three Realtek RTL8110SC network processing chips all compatible with Linux and BSD. Note that the CPU in this appliance isn’t fast enough to turn this thing in to a gigabit router but it’s plenty fast as a gateway device. This particular daughter card actually uses the strange 120-pin plug (see gallery for higher resolution image) in the picture above.

IPCop and Copfilter are free Open Source applications and Justin James has a simple guide on how to install IPCop here if you want to get started right away. I’ll be following up with a more detailed guide.

February 4th, 2008

ISSCC 2008: Details on Intel Silverthorne

Posted by George Ou @ 4:36 am

Categories: Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, Mobile/Wireless, News, Processors

Tags: HyperThreading, Smart Phone, Power Consumption, Intel Corp., Intel Silverthorne, Smart Phones, E-mail, Ultramobile PCs (UMPCs), Processors, Consumer Electronics

At this year’s ISSCC 2008 (International Solid State Circuits Conference), details of Intel’s new 45nm Silverthorne will emerge.  Intel CTO Justin Rattner held a press briefing last Wednesday to preview some of the highlights of this week’s highly technical ISSCC conference in San Francisco.

Credit: Intel Corporation (from ISSCC preview presentation)

Intel Silverthorne is a brand new Intel x86 processor for the Menlow platform developed from the ground up for low-cost and ultra-low power applications.  This includes UMPC (Ultra Mobile PCs), MID (Mobile Internet Devices), set-top applications, some embedded applications, and eventually for smart phone applications though this initial generation may not be suitable yet.  Its small 25mm^2 die size on a 45nm process allows 2500 chips to fit on a single 300mm diameter wafer allows for extremely economic production.

From Rattner’s press conference last week, we know that Silverthorne will launches in the first half of 2008 but Rattner will not give a yes on a Q1 launch in response to one of the questions.  The first Silverthorne dies were publicly shown in April of 2007 in IDF China so it’s quite possible that we’re looking at a second quarter launch.  Rattner also explained that Silverthorne was a dual-issue in-order pipeline architecture with HT (Hyper-threading) and that this was better than hyper-threading in out-of-order architecture.  I later got verification via email that the HT type was SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) and not SoEMT (Switch-On-Event Multithreading).

The slides shown by Rattner indicated that Silverthorne had a power consumption below 1W and up to 2W and that it was “10x lower power than ULV Dothan”.  The Dothan was the second generation Pentium M product and ULV parts had a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 5W.  I later got clarification via email that Silverthorne processors can have TDPs as low as 0.6W with lower clock speeds and higher clocked parts will have a 2 watt TDP.  I spoke with analyst David Kanter of Real World Technologies and he explained that 0.6W which doesn’t factor in chipset power consumption might be too high for smart phone applications.  However, its immediate successor in the Moorestown platform which may launch late 2008 may solve that problem with its SoC (System on Chip) design.

Update 3:10PM - There are quite a few inaccurate reports out there on Silverthorne’s power consumption.  They have reported the power consumption of Silverthorne as 0.6W to 2W which is not correct.  0.6W is actually a TDP rating which describes PEAK power consumption.  Actual idle power consumption can dip down to 0.01W for some models and 0.1W for other models.  Intel is not saying too much more right now but it is reasonable to assume that this extremely low power state is designed to maximize battery life in Smart Phones.  Keeping a continuous Skype or SIP application presence in a UMPC or MID device to receive calls is now a possibility. 

The 2 GHz variant of the Silverthorne processor will operate at 1 volt and it will have performance equivalent to a first generation “Banias” Pentium M notebook processors circa 2003.  Rattner confirmed this was for single-threaded performance on a broad range of applications.  This would seem to imply that with multithreaded applications, the performance would be even higher than Banias which lacks Hyper-Threading.

Here are some additional quotes pulled from Rattner’s slides:

• Deep power down C6
• Optimized register-file and cache 6T bits cells
• CMOS mode on quad-pumped FSB IO
• Split IO power supply

Here are some additional email responses:

• 0.6W to 2W measured TDP power on real world applications – over the lifetime of the processor/architecture
• Can achieve 2GHz core frequencies at 1.0V
• Will support features such as Digital Media Boost (SSE3), Intel Virtualization technology, Intel 64 Architecture support, HT

February 1st, 2008

San Clemente chipset gives HP lead on energy efficiency

Posted by George Ou @ 4:01 am

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors, Servers

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Power Supply, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Watt, Intel Corp., Chipsets, Semiconductors, Processors, Hardware, Components

The January 30th 2008 batch of test results are in for SPECpower_ssj2008 energy efficiency benchmark and it looks like Hewlett Packard has claimed the energy efficiency lead with their newest low-cost 2U HP Proliant DL180 G5 server.  The secret to their success appears to lie in the selection of the Intel 5100 series “San Clemente” chipset.  While the detailed SPECpower disclosure doesn’t actually mention the chipset anywhere, the power characteristics, the six memory DIMMs, and the ICH-9 storage is a dead giveaway.

To see where the modern servers stand on power consumption, I’ve plotted out some ESTIMATED charts to compare the results.  Since the AMD system from Colfax International has 8 registered DDR2-667 DIMMs and the HP San Clemente system has 6 registered DDR2-667 DIMMs, I’ve had to adjust them both down to 4 DIMMs to do a fair comparison with the other Intel systems which used 4 DIMMs.  To do this I had to use an approximation based on known measurements for memory power consumption and I subtracted 1.875 watts to 3.75 watts for each registered DDR2-667 DIMM on a linear sliding scale based on load percentage.  That means I subtracted 7.5 watts for the AMD system at idle and 15 watts for the AMD system at peak power.  For the HP San Clemente system I subtracted 3.75 watts at idle and 7.5 watts at peak loads.

Since it was shocking that a dual-processor eight-core 3 GHz Intel system was drawing lower power than a dual-processor four-core 2.4 GHz AMD system, I thought something might be a little off.  I realized that Colfax had used a pair of redundant 700 watt power supplies whereas the HP San Clemente system uses a single 750 watt power supply which means the power supply for the AMD system is relatively inefficient.  At this point I had to make a reasonable guess at PSU (Power Supply Unit) efficiency and I guessed that the HP single power supply had to be around 80% efficient whereas the Colfax dual-PSU would be around 70%.  Therefore I estimated the power consumption of the AMD system had it used an 80% efficiency power supply instead of a 70% efficient power supply.

Unfortunately this is a rough educated guess so the accuracy is dropping quickly but I wanted to take a reasonable shot at it to level the playing field on PSU efficiency.  Companies in the future when making SPECpower submissions should avoid using dual power supplies and stick with 4-DIMM configurations so that we can get apple to apple comparisons and measurements.  For now the following estimated power consumption graph is what I came up with.

The thing that really sticks out is the fact that the Intel 3 GHz 45nm E5450 processor system uses less power most of the time than the special low-voltage variant of the Intel 2 GHz 65nm L5335 processor.  This shows how drastic an improvement Intel made using HKMG (High-K Metal Gate) materials and a shrink to the 45nm process.

The DIMM and PSU adjusted power consumption for the AMD Opteron 2216HE 4-core 2.4 GHz system has dropped significantly by more than 32 watts at the peak but it’s still more power hungry than the Intel 8-core 3 GHz E5450 at less than 80% load.  Despite the fact that AMD takes a deeper clock speed dive down to 1.0 GHz at idle while Intel only dives down to 2 GHz, Intel’s C1E state seems to dominate the power savings.

This can also tell us something about the “Barcelona” quad-core “HE” (High Efficiency) 1.9 GHz system because it has a TDP of 79 watts which is 11 watts higher than the 2216HE under maximum load per CPU.  Realistically the difference will be smaller than 11 watts per CPU and probably more like an 8 or 9 watts difference so an AMD 2347HE 1.9 GHz dual-processor 8-core version would probably consume 16 more watts.  That would likely put the AMD 8-core 2347HE 1.9 GHz server at higher power consumption level than the 8-core 3 GHz E5450 Intel server running on a San Clemente chipset.  That seems counter intuitive since Intel’s TDP rating for its 45nm 3 GHz processor is 80 watt TDP and that doesn’t even count the memory controller on the motherboard.

When looking at the difference between the HP San Clemente chipset based server and the HP 5000 series chipset based server, there is roughly a 32 to 40 watt difference even though the two CPUs are identical.  Most of that difference is due to an extra 6 to 7 watts per FBDIMM and the remaining power delta is mostly due to the newer chipset on the motherboard.  Had both of these servers had 8 DIMMs, the power gap would have been approximately 26 watts wider because of the extra power consumed by the FBDIMMs on the Intel 5000 series chipset.

Next I plot out the power-adjusted ESTIMATED energy efficiency numbers.  I adjusted all the systems to four DIMMs and gave the AMD Opteron system a boost in power supply efficiency from an assumed 70% efficiency to 80% efficiency.  Again this is a rough guess but it’s reasonable considering the fact that Colfax used a dual 700W power supply instead of a single 750W power supply.  If Colfax International is reading this blog then I would suggest to them not to shortchange their own results in the future and use 4 DIMMs and a single PSU like everyone else.

Hopefully the next batch of results will give us some performance numbers on faster single-socket systems using the Bigby chipset and a 45nm processor so we can see how high on the efficiency scale those servers will go.

January 23rd, 2008

Analysis: Server Side Java energy efficiency versus load

Posted by George Ou @ 5:25 am

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, Processors, Servers

Tags: Performance, Java, Workload, Efficiency, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., CPU, Analysis, Intel Corp., Energy Efficiency, SPEC

With the arrival of the latest standardized energy efficiency benchmark from SPEC, we have a good way to measure server efficiency.  In light of the recent controversy over flawed energy efficiency studies that have unfortunately been touted by so many in the press instead of SPEC, I thought I’d offer some more in-depth analysis on energy efficiency.

The new SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark gives us a standardized way of measuring energy efficiency for Server Side Java.  SPECpower_ssj2008 gives us efficiency data at varying workloads going from 0% to 100% at increments of 10%.  Then it provides us with a Performance to Power Ratio curve along with an average efficiency of those 11 workload measurements.  The two graphs below are compiled from the SPEC database.  It represents the fastest Intel quad-core system (below left) versus the only AMD CPU submitted to the SPECpower_ssj2008 database to date which is a special energy-efficient Opteron 2216HE (below right).

The two graphs above show more than a 3 to 1 advantage for the fastest Intel system when we look at it in terms of percent workload.  This is a perfectly valid way of analyzing the data, but the tradeoff is that you’re not seeing the efficiency of each processor at absolute workloads which might be valuable if you need a system with lighter workloads.  So to offer an alternative method of interpreting the efficiency data, I plotted out the following Efficiency versus CPU capacity graph with published data from SPEC (and some MS Excel help from analyst David Kanter).

• DP = Dual Processor
• UP = Single Processor (Uni-Processor)
• QC = Quad Core
• DC = Dual Core
• FB = Fully Buffered
• “Operations per joule” is identical to ssj_ops/watt unit used by SPEC.
• “Operations per second” refers to Server Side Java performance.

The blue curve represents the Intel E5450 server shown in the SPEC “Performance to Power” chart above left while the cyan curve represents the AMD 2216HE system.  You’ll notice that the curves are somewhat close together at the lower workloads which means the AMD system is almost as efficient as Intel at lighter workloads.  But at peak performance levels, Intel is three times faster than the AMD 2216HE system and more then three times the energy efficiency.  So if you had to buy three of the AMD 2216HE systems to get the same Server Side Java capacity as the Intel E5450, it would cost you three times the power.

You’ll also notice the pink curve spiking upwards in efficiency just shy of the absolute peak efficiency level of Intel’s latest 45nm E5450 3.0 GHz quad-core CPU.  This single-socket single-processor 2.4 GHz XEON X3220 Intel server is by far the most efficient system at lighter workloads.  Had a newer single-socket CPU like the 45nm QX9650 3.0 GHz 45nm quad-core processor been used, the efficiency curve would probably fly off this chart.  Intel’s 5100 series “San Clemente” chipset will  also get much better efficiency than anything on this graph because it uses lower power registered DDR2-667 memory like AMD.

<Next page - How to spot a flawed CPU energy efficient study>

January 22nd, 2008

The polycarbonate all-in-one 22" LCD PC

Posted by George Ou @ 1:47 am

Categories: Build it yourself, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Processors

Tags: PC, Chassis, Motherboard, CPU, LCD, Computer, Productivity, Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware

The last time I built a wooden all-in-one 19″ LCD PC, my family wanted it in the kitchen and my mother wanted it in hers. To keep everyone happy, I built my mother another one (pictured above and below) out of 3/16th inch jet-black polycarbonate which makes the chassis look like the material from a grand piano. The result was something that was so glossy that I can probably shave in it, but I’m almost afraid to touch it and get finger prints all over it. Needless to say, she is very pleased with her new space saving computer. [See photo gallery.]

Cutting this material was fairly simple with wood-cutting and drilling tools. Just be careful to slow down on the table saw so you don’t chip the polycarbonate. I had initially avoided putting in vent holes in the back but the CPU fan and the PSU fan dynamically ramped up in RPM because of the increasing temperature and caused some noise. Once the 4 holes were put in the back, the CPU fan stayed at lower RPM and remained fairly silent even if I stress loaded the CPUs.

This time I mounted the on/off switch up top along with two USB ports which makes it easy to access and comes in handy for the webcam. I just wished I had a webcam that did away with the cable and just had a down-facing USB port so I can just plug it in right on top of the case. The other USB port is convenient for plugging other devices such as USB memory sticks or other devices I want sitting on top of the chassis.

As usual with these slim custom chassis, I used a slim 1.75″ 1U Sparkle SPI220LE 80 Plus 220 watt power supply. The idle power consumption on this computer is 43 watts and 63 watt under peak CPU loads generated by WPrime. The motherboard is an ECS 945GCT-M which came bundled with an Intel Celeron 430 CPU (Conroe-L 1.8 GHz single-core) I got at Fry’s for $70. I put in an Intel Core 2 Duo E2140 dual-core 1.6 instead and kept the lower-profile CPU fan which came with the Celeron 430. That lower profile fan came in real handy since it fit inside my 3″ thick chassis which is even less space inside because of the thickness of the walls. This chassis has plenty of room for additional devices such as a slim optical slot-loaded drive.

<next page>

January 16th, 2008

Why DIDN'T the MacBook Air get the new 45nm CPU?

Posted by George Ou @ 3:36 am

Categories: Apple, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors

Tags: Apple MacBook, Apple Inc., CPU, Intel Corp., Notebooks, Processors, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Semiconductors, Components

Intel launched their brand new 45nm mobile dual-core processors last week with 60% smaller packaging size.  Yesterday Apple announced their Über-sleek MacBook Air ultra-slim notebook which also uses a specially designed Intel dual-core CPU with 60% smaller packaging.  Naturally I assumed the new MacBook Air uses Intel’s latest Penryn-class 45nm technology with low leakage hafnium metal gates and I called Intel for confirmation of this “special” processor.  I thought to myself: What’s so special about it if every PC vendor can use the same shrunken CPU?

To my surprise, Apple didn’t use the newest 45nm mobile processor with 107mm^2 die size; they really did use a “one-off” “Merom” 65nm 143mm^2 die designed-just-for-Apple CPU from Intel.  Intel specially designed a larger 65nm core with a specially designed package that’s 60% smaller.  This means instead of using the latest 45nm processors that are faster and more energy efficient and are already that small without any special packaging, Apple got a “special” 65nm chip.

This begs the question why Intel doesn’t make its new 45nm packaging even smaller than the current 60% reduction in size if it can reduce its packaging by 60% on 65nm technology.  It also begs the question why Apple had to go to the trouble of a tailor made 65nm part when the 45nm part launched 3 weeks before the launch of the MacBook Air.  Several other PC makers were already showing off their 45nm based notebooks last week at CES.

I spoke to a few people about this and asked for some theories and we came to a somewhat reasonable guess so I’ll offer these up as some possible reasons.  For a product as specialized at exotic as the MacBook Air, the design would have needed to start some time ago.  When that design started, it may not have been a certainty if 45nm Mobile Penryn would be ready to ship with MacWorld and there may not have been working samples to start the design process.

Despite the fact that other PC makers have 45nm based notebooks ready to launch, none of them are this sleek.  So ultimately it doesn’t really change the appeal of the MacBook Air and it will be the thinnest notebook on the market.  In 20/20 hindsight perhaps it would have been better if the MacBook Air had shipped with a 45nm CPU and maybe we’ll see a quick refresh from Apple to the new processor since the size is obviously not a problem.  It’s just that “special” in this case isn’t a flattering thing when referencing the older CPU used in the MacBook Air, but the MacBook Air is still every bit special in a flattering way.

January 15th, 2008

Beware of flawed CPU efficiency study

Posted by George Ou @ 3:47 am

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Servers

Tags: Quad-core, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., CPU, Intel Corp., Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, George Ou

Update 2/22/2008 - I originally used the word “rigged” to describe Neal Nelson’s study. My reasoning for using the word “rigged” was due to the fact that the test platforms used in Nelson’s study painted an inaccurate picture. Nelson’s study omitted two generations of Intel products while including pre-shippings products from AMD. Since I cannot know for a fact whether the test subject selection was intentional or merely coincidental, I changed the word “rigged” to “flawed”. Other than this change, I stand by my analysis here.

What if we held a football game involving the Patriots and any other NFL team where we set up a Patriots handicap that prohibited Tom Brady and the rest of his starting lineup from playing? What if the result was a loss for the Patriots and we splash the headline across the sports newswire that the Patriots just lost a football game? Would you think this was ethical behavior? Well that’s precisely what happened yesterday when the Neal Nelson report titled “AMD beats Intel in quad-core server power efficiency” spread across the newswire and got repeated as fact.

This is a classic case where the measurements are most likely accurate, but what’s being measured isn’tNeal Nelson and Associates is a consulting firm that has made it a habit to put out these handicapped reports on processor efficiency. Last year they excluded Intel’s quad-core lineup when AMD didn’t have quad-core processors and declared AMD the winner and got lots of news coverage, now they’re comparing Intel chips released in Q4 2006 to AMD technology that may not be available to the general public until Q2-2008 and the press seems to be falling for it all over again.

Nelson compared AMD’s Opteron 2350 2.0 GHz quad-core processor (may not ship again until Q2-2008 when the TLB bug hopefully gets fixed) to Intel’s older 65nm “Clovertown” E5335 and E5345 processor which were released in Q4 2006. These weren’t even the newest 65nm G Stepping Clovertown processors from mid-2007 with lower power consumption; these were the older stepping released in 2006. But Intel launched their latest 45nm “Harpertown” processors in November of 2007 and these chips were excluded from this “study” on AMD versus Intel energy efficiency. This is a classic case where the measurements are most likely accurate, but what’s being measured isn’t. This is a critical omission because the 45nm chips from Intel made significant improvements in performance and energy efficiency which has a double impact on performance per watt.

Nelson basically took a product from AMD that hasn’t even sorted out the bugs yet and can’t be purchased yet, then compared it to Intel’s 2006 technology while excluding two newer generations of Intel technology that are available in quantity, and he declares AMD the “winner” on energy efficiency. Then in an ultimate twist of irony, Nelson has the gall to question the methodology of the latest SPEC power efficiency standard SPECpower_ssj2008 when his own tests are outright deceptive. But in reality, SPEC doesn’t go out and declare winners or losers for cheap headlines or overstate the importance of their data; they merely present data with full vendor disclosures and provide valuable data points to the public.

When I did my in-depth review of SPECpower_ssj2008, I tempered the results for AMD despite the fact that the early SPECpower_ssj2008 results showed complete domination by Intel over AMD. I stated that the results would have been more competitive for AMD (at least at comparable clock speeds) if a web server version of SPECpower was used and when AMD quad-core Opteron gets its bugs sorted out. I still stand by that assessment based on the fact that AMD does well on a clock-for-clock basis when looking at SPECweb_2005 performance. However, Intel still commands the clock speed advantage which makes them the performance leader but at least AMD can be competitive on web serving duties at the lower clock speeds if they can fix their bug and launch their quad-core parts.

So who should the IT manager believe when it comes to performance per watt? Ideally you run your own tests on your own applications and draw your own conclusions but that may not be an option for everyone. If running your own tests isn’t feasible, I would recommend finding publicly acknowledged reputable benchmarks like those from SPEC or TPC and try to find the benchmark that most closely resembles your workload. While that isn’t perfect, it’s the closest thing to commissioning your own tests. But what you should not do is rely on consulting firms that have of a track record for fixing the game.

January 14th, 2008

Samsung multi-function printers scan direct to USB

Posted by George Ou @ 4:26 am

Categories: CES2008, Energy efficiency - green, Networking, News, ~Events~

Tags: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., USB, E-mail, Printers, Online Communications, Hardware, Peripherals, George Ou

Unfortunately, one of the least used features on all-in-one multi-function printers and heavy duty copier/scanner/printer machines is the scan function because it’s simply too complicated.  If you’re lucky, IT will set up your email account as a preconfigured setting and they’ll teach you how to scan a document to your email inbox.  If you’re geeky enough to go and figure out how to key in your own email, then you might be one of the other two people in the building that uses the scan functionality.  But most people simply keep paper copies and do everything the way they’ve always done it by making more copies and storing them in a file cabinet if they’re organized enough.  Well Samsung might actually change this with their direct to USB multi-function printers.

One of the features I’ve searched long and hard for is a scan-to-USB feature.  I’ve asked representatives from Xerox and every other copier company that offers multi-function copiers with little luck.  I’ve asked HP for this feature and no luck there either.  But last week as I went through Samsung’s CES booth, I thought I’d check out their color multifunction printers and I notice a nice little USB port in the front of them.  The Samsung representative explained that the USB port can act as a print source or scan destination and I thought FINALLY we’ve made scanning easy.

The color multi-function printers in question are the Samsung CLX-3160 (pictured left) and the yet-to-be-released CLX-6200.  Both devices can print an assortment of document types such as PDF, JPEG, TXT, etc directly from USB memory.  Both devices can also scan documents and save them directly to the USB memory.  This means that instead of trying to figure out how to configure an email destination which is difficult without a qwerty keyboard or figure out how to dump to a scan to a network file share, you simply dump the scan to USB.  Now you just take those stacks of documents and shove it in the feeder and it will get digitized on to USB memory!

The difference between the Samsung CLX-6200 and CLX-3160 is that the 6200 can print all four colors at the same time whereas the 3160 does color one color at a time.  This means that the 6200 prints color more than four times faster than the 3160 and it also prints black and white a little faster.  The 6200 will also print full duplex two-sided output automatically which cuts down paper consumption in half if only people can be educated on using it.  The 3160 is available now online for roughly $450.  The 6200 will launch at the end of this quarter for $200 more than the 3160 and should be well worth the price as a workgroup all-in-one.  Personally I wouldn’t mind having one of these near my cubical.

January 9th, 2008

Plasmas giving way to LCD technology at CES 2008

Posted by George Ou @ 10:37 am

Categories: CES2008, Consumer electronics, Energy efficiency - green, ~Events~

Tags: George Ou, Consumer Electronics Show

It seems like where ever you go at CES 2008, LCD technology dominates the show floor on everything from tiny 1″ LCD photo chains to massive 108″ LCD HDTVs. I checked with China-based Konka (OEM as Insignia at Best Buy) and they have given up on Plasma technology and are focusing exclusively on LCD. Their 46″ 1080p LCD HDTV will cost distributors around $800 so the prices continue to plummet.

Meanwhile, Plasma technology is being pushed in to the ultra high-end with exotic beasts like the Panasonic 150″ Plasma 4000×2000 pixel display. As LCDs increase in size, plasma displays will continue to lose ground in the 40 to 56 inch mainstream arena. Since plasma displays are power hogs, that might be a good thing.

January 3rd, 2008

Build a Mac Pro equivalent workstation for 1/3 the cost

Posted by George Ou @ 5:04 am

Categories: Apple, Build it yourself, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, Processors, Workstations

Tags: Processor, Apple Macintosh, Workstation, Wisdom, Dual Processor, Intel Corp., Mac Pro, Serial ATA, Chipsets, Workstations

Conventional wisdom tells us that a digital content creation and CAD professional had to fork out $6000 to $10,000 dollars for a high-end 8-core dual-processor workstation, but this is Real World IT where I say screw conventional wisdom.  I’ve put on my mad scientist hat again and brewed something up for $2311 with equal or better performance than a $6803 Mac Pro (as configured in Apple screen cap to the left).  Now granted you can’t run Mac OS X so that might be a show stopper for a Mac user, but there are plenty of Windows users who want something that will run just as fast.  If that’s you, then keep reading!

The Mac Pro is essentially based on an Intel 5000 series dual-processor chipset.  At present time, it still only comes with 65nm “Clovertown” processors maxing out at 3.0 GHz and not the recently launched 45nm “Harpertown” processors and newer motherboard that use the Intel 5100 series “San Clemente” chipset.  As I showed in my quad-core CPU comparisons, the newer 45nm processors costing $300 can rival $1200 65nm processors.  Furthermore, the 5100 series chipset supports cheaper and more energy efficient registered DDR2 memory instead of the power-hungry FBDIMMs (fully buffered DDR2 memory) used in the Intel 5000 series motherboards.

My home-brew 8-core solution costs about a third of the price with performance equal or better than the fastest Mac Pro you can buy on the market.  But when it comes to SSE4 optimized video encoding which nearly every video encoding software package is going to support, you can expect a massive increase in performance over the 65nm “Clovertown” quad-core processors.  Other improvements in my solution is a 5-drive hot-swap SATA back plane which allows you to easily swap out up to five hard drives.  The video card I used is an NVIDIA Quadro NVS290 designed specifically for the workstation market and it is also used in Sun’s single processor workstation.

Apple on the other hand uses the out-dated ATI Radeon X1900 XT which is actually a desktop gaming graphics card and not a workstation card.  Below is the exact configuration and pricing for this system.  I also threw in a cordless Logitech EX110 keyboard and optical mouse.  Since Apple includes free shipping, my quoted prices (as usual) includes the cost of shipping.  I also rounded to the nearest dollar and I do not include the effect of rebates in the quoted prices though I mention one rebate in the part description.  I got these prices by roaming the search engines to find reasonable prices mostly from places that I have personally shopped before.

Updated 5:45PM - All Windows drivers for the Intel 5100 series “San Clemente” chipset have now been confirmed and can be downloaded here so both systems are confirmed to operate any x86 or x64 version of Windows XP, 2003, Vista.  I have also verified XP and Vista x86/x64 driver support for all the other components.

Note that the use of FBDIMMs on the 5400 series platform adds about 7 watts of power consumption per DIMM, but the 5400 series ”Seaburg” chipset has the added benefit of a 50% larger snoop filter and official DDR2-800 support so it’s a higher end chipset.  While the 5400 series chipset supports up to 16 FBDIMMs, the 5400 motherboard listed below has 4 DIMM slots whereas the 5100 series motherboard listed below has 8 DIMM slots.  You can get higher memory capacity 5400 series motherboards but they cost a little more so it a toss up which chipset you should use.  You can get a Supermicro X7DWN+B for example which has dual gigabit LAN and 16 FBDIMM slots for an extra $150 over the price of the Tyan S5392ANR.

High-end 8-core 2P Workstation (5400 series “Seaburg” version):

High-end 8-core 2P workstation (5100 series “San Clemente” version):

If you don’t know how to build a PC or you’re rusty, here’s a step-by-step guide.  You can also have a local PC shop assemble the whole thing for around $100 or so and some will even install the OS for a little more money.  Other shops may just sell you all the parts for a minimal markup with no charge on assembly if you take this parts list to them.

As for which LCD display to buy, make sure you buy something that isn’t a typical TN type panel with lousy viewing angles and lousy 18-bit color.  Dell’s $700 24″ 2407WFP-HC is highly rated and it uses a high color PVA type panel with true wide viewing angles that don’t drastically drop in contrast ratio when viewed off center.  The inexpensive $300 24″ Soyo (available at Office Max) is actually an MVA type panel with true 24-bit color and wide viewing angles.  If you don’t need a super high color gamut, picking up two of the 24″ Soyos for dual-screens might be a great solution.  For comparison purposes, the Apple iMac 20″ uses the lousy TN type display while the 24″ iMac uses the superior PVA, MVA, or IPS TFT technology.

Update 5:45AM - What about Dell workstations?

Larry Dignan asked me what about Dell solutions for the workstation market.  That’s a great question and I just looked it up on Dell’s website.  I configured a Dell Precision T7400 with identical CPU and GPU configuration but with the older Intel 5000 series chipset [Update 6:40AM - reader s_souche pointed out that the T7400 is actually based on the newer 5400 series "Seaburg" chipset which also uses FBDIMMs and has the highest memory capacity].  One problem was that it only allowed me to configure half the memory using 4 1GB FBDIMMs.  This makes me wonder if there are only four DIMM slots in the entire system which would be rather unusual for a 5400 series motherboard.

It was also crazy that they charge an extra $350 to upgrade to a 500 GB SATA hard drive when those drives are barely worth $100 to begin with.  The total price for the RAM deficient system was $3817.  You will have to go out and buy your own 2GB FBDIMMs if you want to get up to 8GB RAM.  That’s not as bad as the Mac Pro configuration above but it’s still far worse than my home brew.

January 2nd, 2008

A comparison of quad-core server CPUs

Posted by George Ou @ 3:52 pm

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, Processors, Servers, Workstations

Tags: Processor, Quad-core, Memory Bandwidth, Server, Dual Processor, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., CPU, Intel Corp., Chip, TLB

For anyone looking to buy a workstation or server CPU, quad-core CPUs have become mainstream. Therefore it’s important to know what you’re getting for the money so I’ve compiled a chart with general purpose computing performance using the SPEC CPU database with the highest scores as of December 28, 2007. I included single and dual processor solutions to help you decide whether you want to go single CPU socket or dual socket motherboard. You and also read more about energy efficiency on server processors here.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF from the TechRepublic Downloads Library.

All Intel dual processor models starting with the 54xx are the latest “Harpertown” 45nm CPUs launched in November 2007. All Intel dual processor models starting with 53xx are the 65nm “Clovertown” quad-cores Intel launched in late 2006 and mid 2007. In the single processor space, only the QX9650 “Yorkfield” processor uses Intel’s latest 45nm process and everything else uses the 65nm process. The Q6600 and X3220 are essentially identical processors marketed towards desktop and entry level server markets respectively. Since one of the key differentiators on a workstation/server system is the inclusion of error correction memory, one can use any of the desktop CPUs in an ECC capable single processor motherboard.

The two AMD processors are Opteron quad-core CPUs based on 65nm “Barcelona”. The 2.0 GHz Opteron 2350 is delayed due to the TLB bug and the 2.5 GHz Opteron 2360SE won’t come out until the B3 stepping is out which fixes the TLB bug and brings higher clock speeds. There are reports that B3 stepping may be delayed until Q2 of 2008 (tranlated link here) though AMD’s last analyst meeting presentation has a rough timeline of Q1 or Q2.

Note: SPEC CPU is broken down by performance on general purpose integer and scientific memory-bandwidth/floating-point intensive workloads. The general purpose workloads are summarized by a geometric mean score called SPECint and the scientific workloads are summarized by a geometric mean score called SPECfp. The results are further broken down by single-threaded results and multi-threaded results labeled as “rate2006″. Note that a geometric mean is sort of like an average but it punishes the extremes more with a lower score than the average if a particular chip performs very poorly on some workloads. Ideally, one would simply benchmark their own specific application but that’s not always possible so these published numbers from SPEC are very valuable data points.

SPECint includes workloads like Perl, compression, compilers, video compression, and other general purpose workloads. SPECfp includes workloads like bwaves, gamess, gromacs, povray, and a dozen other memory bandwidth and floating point intensive benchmarks. So while it’s important to have a general ideal of how a chip performs in general, discriminating buyers will look inside the detailed disclosure (which I link to) and look at the application that is most similar to their own. So while a chip from AMD might have a lower overall score on SPECfp_rate2006, there are individual workloads within SPECfp that overwhelmingly favor AMD’s memory bandwidth advantage. The inverse of this situation where an Intel CPU has a lower overall SPECfp score than an AMD CPU but still win some of the specific workloads can also be true. So in a nutshell, the chip you select should be based on your application requirements.

* These results were invalidated last month because of lack of availability. Furthermore, the TLB bug patch performance penalty has not been factored in to these results. Assuming AMD fixes the bug in Stepping B3 and solves the manufacturing challenges in mid 2008 to deliver 2.5 GHz parts, scores similar to these invalidated numbers can be resubmitted. So while these numbers are officially invalidated, they were invalidated for lack of availability and not for inaccuracy so I left these numbers in for comparison purposes.

** Results for the X5482 3.2 GHz systems seem odd since they’re worse than the E5472 3 GHz results. Intel gave an unofficial estimate at IDF2007 of 89.8 for SPECfp_rate2006 so we might see this number get updated as time goes by. Note that the SPEC CPU base scores for the X5482 were higher than the E5472 so that seems to fall more in line with expectation.

These results indicate a significant improvement with Intel’s latest 45nm technology in multi-threaded applications. Comparing 3 GHz Harpertown with 3 GHz Clovertown, improvements for single-threaded applications were noticeable in the 8% range and that is mostly attributable to architectural enhancements in the chip’s execution engine. At 3.0 GHz for multi-threaded applications, we saw a ~14% improvement on both SPECint and SPECfp using the same motherboard chipset and the additional gains are mostly due to the 50% larger CPU cache. But once the new 5400 series “Seaburg” chipset got involved with a 50% larger snoop filter and 20% faster memory bus, the 3.0 GHz scores jumped 22.2% for SPECint and 30.1% for SPECfp.

Considering the fact that the energy efficient 45nm Intel E5410 2.33 GHz chip costs around $300 whereas the 65nm Intel E5345 2.33 GHz chip costs around $600, buyers who are looking for Intel based solutions should immediately switch to 45nm technology. The Intel E5410 even manages to beat the $1200 Intel X5365 3.0 GHz processor on SPECfp_rate2006 and comes awfully close on SPECint_rate2006. So for the general purpose server market, the new E5410 on average seems to be the performance/dollar leader.

HPC (High Performance Computing) customers who have memory bandwidth intensive workloads on the other hand have been purchasing loads of inexpensive AMD Barcelona processors despite the TLB bug. Those memory-bandwidth hungry customers are using custom Linux kernels that work around the TLB bug with minimal impact on performance so they don’t care about the bug or the lower overall SPECfp scores.

December 19th, 2007

Hitting 50W peak on a dual-core desktop computer

Posted by George Ou @ 8:54 pm

Categories: AMD, Build it yourself, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors

Tags: Desktop, Dual-core, Stock, Power Consumption, Memory, Motherboard, Computer, Watt, Desktop Computer, Processors

The 50W no-compromise dual-core commodity desktop PC is now a reality!I have some great news for the green computing world.  The 50W no-compromise dual-core commodity desktop PC is now a reality!  It all started a few months back when I looked in to the possibility of building a main stream dual-core desktop computer that can drop under 50 watts idle but now I’ve answered that question beyond all expectations.  Using a 220W Sparkle SPI220LE “80 Plus” efficient power supply, an Intel E2140 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU running at lower-than-spec 0.95 volts, and a Gigabyte G33M-DS2R motherboard, the system comes in just under 50 watts at *PEAK* CPU load generated by WPrime running 2 threads.  If I could only find a smaller 100 watt 80 Plus power supply and hit the optimum 50% loading at peak power consumption, then it might be possible to get peak system loads down to around 45 watts.

At idle the system uses 41 watts which is actually one watt higher than my sub-$400 All-in-One LCD PC with an ECS 945GCT-M motherboard and an Intel E2180 2.0 GHz dual-core running at stock speeds and voltage.  It turns out that this G33M-DS2R board with E2140 CPU running at stock speeds and voltage has an idle system power of 46 watts which is 6 watts higher than the ECS board with E2180.  This was surprising to me since the new G33 chipset has a more energy efficient memory controller than the 945 chipset.

Possible explanations are the fact that the G33-based motherboard was running the memory at 400 MHz base clock (DDR2-800 memory) whereas the 945-based motherboard was running the memory at 200 MHz.  One other factor is the fact that the Gigabyte G33M-DS2R Intel G33-based motherboard has a 6-port SATA ICH9R RAID controller along with a few more memory and PCI ports.  This leads me to think that the combination 2x the memory clock and more components translates to an additional 6 watts of power consumption.

The following idle/peak power consumption charts are from data I collected.

* SPI SPI220LE 220W 80+ PSU
** No system fan which saves 1W power

Gigabyte with Intel CPU = G33M-DS2R motherboard
Gigabyte AMD CPU = MA69GM-S2H motherboard
MSI with AMD CPU = K9AGM2-FIH motherboard

December 14th, 2007

SPEC launches standardized energy efficiency benchmark

Posted by George Ou @ 7:50 am

Categories: AMD, Energy efficiency - green, Hardware, Intel, News, Processors, Servers

Tags: Performance, Java, Quad-core, Power Consumption, Server, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Energy Efficiency, SPECpower_ssj2008, Servers, Processors

SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) launched its first standardized energy efficiency benchmark SPECpower_ssj2008 this week which tackles something that the computer industry has struggled to define in recent years.  With datacenter energy costs spiraling out of control, server customers have struggled to sort out the conflicting messages from technology vendors about who is the energy efficiency leader.  Now the industry has a standardized way to measure the energy efficiency of computer servers.

Even though this first version of SPEC Power only addresses server side Java performance, it is one of the most comprehensive standards for energy efficiency to date giving it instant credibility.  Other energy efficiency metrics like the Green500 list simply takes the theoretical aggregate FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) of a cluster of computers and divides it by the measured peak power consumption or even peak rated power consumption if measurements aren’t given.  Since FLOPS aren’t really a good real-world measurement of performance to begin with and most people don’t operate their servers at peak loads or run massive clusters, the Green500 list simply isn’t that useful of a metric.

SPECpower_ssj2008 is basically a measure of ssj_ops/watt (server side Java operations per second per watt).  I would personally prefer to call it ssj_opj (server side Java operations per unit of energy in Joules) since “per second per watt” is by definition “per Joule”.  SPECpower_ssj2008 factors in the fact that servers usually aren’t operated at peak capacity and they’re even idle at times.  To factor for idle and peak load power consumption, average power consumption at 0, 10, 20, 30, all the way through 100 percent load capacity are measured and disclosed.  Then server side Java operations per second are divided by the average power consumption in watts at every 10% increment and then all the scores are averaged again to produce the “overall” ssj_ops/watt metric.  The following graph is from the current SPECpower_ssj2008 performance leader as of DEC 12th 2008 and it illustrates how this benchmark works.

I spoke to the President of SPEC Walter Bays yesterday about this new power benchmark and my preference for using ssj_opj was one of the topics that came up.  I also asked Bays why there couldn’t also be a SPECint_rate2006/watt or SPECfp_rate2006/watt measurement.  Although Bays couldn’t comment specifically on availability or the existence of future benchmarks, he did explain that the SPEC CPU (SPECint and SPECfp) benchmarks are peak throughput only which would be fairly simple to measure and interesting.  The resulting metric would be a lot more valuable than the FLOPS/watt rating used in the Green500 list since SPEC CPU is much more comprehensive than a simple FLOP measurement.  Bays also explained that SPECweb2005 might be a good candidate but it was a more complex benchmark (due to the multiple systems involved) making too much to tackle for the initial version of SPECpower.

<Next page - First server comparisons for SPECpower_ssj2008>

November 29th, 2007

Updated sub-$400 all-in-one dual-core LCD PC images

Posted by George Ou @ 6:05 am

Categories: Build it yourself, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Mobile/Wireless

Tags: Dual-core, Kitchen, PC, Movie, LCD, USB, Computer, AIO Computer, Productivity, Monitors & Displays

I’ve put the top and bottom lid on my new sub-$400 all-in-one dual-core LCD PC and mounted an 802.11 b/g USB adapter to it so I can use the computer anywhere in the house. To keep the chassis cool, I drilled 5 large holes on the top board. I am still waiting for my female USB socket connectors that hook up to the USB leads on the motherboard so I’ve temporarily used one the venting holes to mount the USB Wi-Fi adapter. I also need to paint the thing black to match the color of the LCD and sand some things down. [See gallery, A computer's place is in the kitchen, for larger photos.]

The AIO computer is sitting on the corner of my kitchen dining table and there are no bulky ATX towers sitting on the floor or table.

This particular power strip is a bit bulky so I’m looking forward to finding something thinner that I can bolt to the bottom of the PC chassis. Having the extra power sockets right there on the computer is really nice to have.

When the computer isn’t being used or if it’s being used as a movie playback device, I can tuck the mouse and keyboard away taking up less room than a laptop sitting on the table.

To put this in to proper perspective, here’s the entire kitchen table with the AIO computer sitting at the edge of the table. It hardly takes any room and the table is wide open for eating. I finally had the kids eating at the kitchen table for once since I had a movie playing. Once I get an HDTV ATSC USB tuner dongle, this will also act as an HDTV with PVR capability along with wireless connectivity to a DVD library.

This is what the back looks like. It will be a lot less noticeable once it’s sanded and painted all black.

If you want to see what the insides look like, see the original image gallery.

Update 11/30/2007 - I’ve bolted a slimmer power strip to the bottom of the wood box and it’s a lot cleaner since I no longer have a loose power strip to worry about.  It gives me extra AC ports for things like speakers or anything else that needs power.

November 26th, 2007

The $363 19-inch dual-core all-in-one LCD PC

Posted by George Ou @ 4:36 pm

Categories: Build it yourself, Consumer electronics, Desktop, Energy efficiency - green, Fun Stuff, Hardware, Mobile/Wireless, Processors, Vista

Tags: Keyboard, Hard Drive, Dual-core, Mouse, PC, Price Tag, Photograph, LCD, Computer, Shocker

Update 11/29/2007 - See updated AIO computer images

This is the new all-in-one Intel dual-core 2.0 GHz E2180 19″ LCD PC computer I built for the family. The shocker is that I did it for less than $363 in parts (not including keyboard and mouse). The 19″ LCD (1440×900 resolution) was on sale for $140 and the dual-core Intel CPU/Motherboard/graphics was on sale at Fry’s for an eye-popping $88 and I just couldn’t resist the temptation to build a nice all-in-one for the kitchen/dining area. I got a 300 GB hard drive for $50 and 1 GB of RAM for $30 (with an additional $20 rebate) and I used a $50 energy efficient “80 plus” 220 watt 1U power supply. For the chassis I used some scrap wood I had left over and spent 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon building this computer. [See image gallery.]

I haven’t made the top lid or bottom lid for this computer yet but this picture shows the full thickness of the computer bolted on to the back of the 19″ LCD display. The entire computer excluding the 19″ display consumes 40 watts in idle and 65 watts peak (WPrime with 2 threads).  The 19″ LCD consumes 22 watts when it’s operating at full resolution regardless of the image being displayed.  If the system is overclocked to 2.66 GHz, then the peak wattage goes up to 100 watts which is still well within safety margins.  Note that this particular motherboard that came free with the CPU isn’t a stable overclocker so I don’t recommend overclocking on this system with this motherboard. For testing purposes, I loaded Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition and it booted up in less than 35 seconds (10 seconds due to BIOS post).

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With the top and bottom are sealed off (with some holes for venting heat), I wanted to make sure the CPU fan had a fresh supply of cool air so I cut out a hole in the back. I didn’t have one of those circular cutters handy so I had to freehand the hole with a jigsaw so I still need to sand it in to something smoother. I also didn’t want to make the chassis an extra inch thicker to accommodate the retail box fan that came with the CPU. To minimize cable clutter, I used 1 foot long power cords plugged in to a power strip. That strip also comes in handy for plugging in lots of other things.

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Unlike the VESA stand PC I built a few months ago, this computer uses the monitor’s factory stand which allows me the full range in tilt motion. Here in the photo you see that it’s tilted all the way back and it’s in no danger or tipping over.

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For the photo gallery, I used the Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop keyboard and mouse. Not shown is a tiny USB Bluetooth dongle in the back that connects the keyboard and mouse.

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This photo shows the inside of the system with the back, top, bottom covers off. The hard drive is bolted on to the side but I will need to put some rubber washers on to minimize hard drive noise. Wood has a nasty habit of amplifying sound which is great for musical instruments but not so good for computers so I’ll need to spray the inner walls with insulation foam to minimize noise. I’ll probably look in to plastic materials in the future.

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This is the back of the computer with the components exposed. As you can see, the box is not much bigger than the Micro ATX motherboard. The hard drive had to overlap the motherboard a little so that the entire box can be narrower than the 17″ wide 19″ diagonal LCD display. The LCD has a DVI input but the motherboard only had VGA out so a VGA cable was used. Wired Ethernet was used but I have enough room to plug in a PCI wireless LAN adapter using a 90 degrees PCI adapter.  [Update 11:55PM - I'm probably going to go for a cheap 802.11g USB adapter since that saves me the trouble of using a PCI angle adapter.  The fact that I can mount it on top means it will probably get better radio reception.]

This is the full profile view of my new all-in-one computer. Note that I made a mistake of not turning the bad side of the wood in so you can see some flaws in the wood. It’s not too late for me to unscrew it and turn it around though.

So the bottom line is that while it isn’t pretty from the side or the back, you won’t ever notice it from the front and it doesn’t take any more space than the LCD display would occupy by itself. The price tag is $1000 cheaper than commercial all-in-one computers from Apple, Gateway, and now Dell. Sure you can get a laptop but laptops don’t have 19″ displays and they can’t safely clock to 2.66 GHz like this one. Having a full size keyboard and a real mouse makes this computer as powerful as a desktop yet it’s portable.

[Update 11:59PM] - Instructions for making your own box
If you want to make your own box, you just need to cut 6 pieces of board.  The dimensions for front and back plate are 17″ by 8.75″.  Side plates are 8.75″ by 2.5″.  Top and bottom are 17″ by 3″ (thickness of front and back added 0.5″).  The top 2 VESA holes are 2.75″ from the top (not including thickness of top plate).  The four VESA mounting holes are centered on the box and measure 100mm apart.

The box needs to be mounted to the LCD before the motherboard is installed.  To figure out where to mount the motherboard, place the motherboard and power supply on the wood and mark where the mounting holes will be with a pencil.

My colleague Justin James suggested that I go to the auto supply store and buy some rubber underbody coating (spray or roll on) for spraying on the internal walls to dampen the noise.  That should also pad the contact between the hard drive and the side wall so that the hard drive noise isn’t amplified by the wooden box.

[Update 11/27/2007] - A number of people in the talkback want to know about the RF interference characteristics and whether I will paint the box black or not.  On the RF interference issue, all motherboards and electronic components are already FCC certified to be within limits of how much RF noise can be leaked and I haven’t had any RF interference issues running my over-the-air HDTV tuner in my home or radio close by to this computer.  As for painting the box black, yes that is what I intend to do so that it will blend in with the LCD.

Update 11/29/2007 - See updated AIO computer images