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Sunday, December 05, 2004

AMD Cools It
"The technology, called PowerNow with Optimized Power Management, lets the operating system slow the processor's clock speed and consequently reduce power consumption by as much as 80 percent, said Ben Williams, vice president of AMD's server microprocessor business unit.

"If you can use less power, you can create denser configurations and you can help the customer cut down on operating expenses in terms of air-conditioning load," Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said. "It's not as if (PowerNow) was going to give AMD a unique advantage there, but certainly it balances any advantage Intel thought it would have."

I love AMD. Without them, the stupidty we all showed in embracing Intel's Celeron would have thrown us all into bankrupcy by now. But this I don't understand. You reduce power consumption to use less power by slowing the clock speed so you can build denser configurations? Now I know some of you aren't going to be able follow the foibles of that path of mislogic, so, in a nutshell: the conundrum here is that denser configurations are usually needed to enhance processing power but if you reduce the clock speed (a point at which AMD is already at a disadvantage) you need denser configurations which use more power, etc., etc..

This only works when the system is at rest, which is really inconsequential because, if the "dense configuration" spends most of its time at reast then you don't need as dense a configuration as you have. (With rare exceptions.) You catching on yet? It's like digging up sand to build bricks for a staircase. The deeper the hole, the more bricks you'll need to build more stairs to get to the top because the hole is getting deeper...

# Permalink Posted at 9:14 PM 10 comments Email this Link

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I think it's very common for servers and such to not always be under 100% load. Ideally, you're only going to reach 100% CPU load at the highest peak of usage. In the mean time when there aren't a lot of people using your server (such as now at 2:30am) you can let the processors throttle down to save on the electrical bill.

# posted by David 12:34 AM

It does make sense, especially if you look at it from the business server perspective:

A business server needs enough computing power (a dense enough configuration) to cope with peak traffic. However, 90% of the time it is not being fully utilised. In the old non-power-management systems, the server(s) would still draw the same amount of power and create the same amount of heat all day long, even while not being fully used. Meaning expensive power/air-conditioning bills.
But with Optimized Power Management then the servers are 'turned down' when not needed. Kinda like turning a light off when you're not in the room. Which is going to save businesses money.

Thats how I see it anyway.

# posted by Perros 2:30 AM

Okay, so, this stuff is power saving only when the servers/blades aren't really doing anything. And AMD is counting on excess capacity environments for the system to work. I'll grudgingly agree that sort of makes sense but I'm still getting itchy from it.

# posted by Bill 2:51 AM

Hold on there Bill...
Notice that AMD is saying that you CAN create denser configurations. AMD is only commenting on what this CPU allows companies to accomplish that wasn't really available from AMD before. If a business has to limit their capacity because of power requirements, then this new CPU will remove that limitation and allow them to increase that MAXIMUM capacity. Since power costs of this sort are an average of MAXIMUM usage, and, as was commented on previously, a server farm will sit idle for at least 80% of the time, then this creates the possibility of huge capacity at a much lower average operating cost.

# posted by John 6:01 AM

Bill is still upset because AMD won't "give" him an FX-55 to play with

# posted by WRM 7:17 AM

Hey, I offered to buy one --at a liberal discount.

# posted by Bill 8:04 AM

John - Darn! I couldna said it better myself. Congrats!

# posted by Bill 8:05 AM

"The deeper the hole, the more bricks you'll need to build more stairs to get to the top because the hole is getting deeper..."
Yeah, but ..
When you dig a hole half the available pitch, and as deep as your required rise, you only need half of the material that came out of it to build the steps within the hole, the other half you use to build steps to the rise.

# posted by Anonymous 8:51 AM

Thanks, Norm.

# posted by Bill 8:57 AM

"...if you reduce the clock speed (a point at which AMD is already at a disadvantage)..."

AMD may suffer from a slower clock speed, but an unknown advantage that the processor has over Intel is that is performs 9 operations per clock cycle, while Intel only does 6. This makes and AMD 2.2GHz processor roughly equivalent to and Intel 3.4GHz chip. And since AMD processors are far easier to overclock, this makes the AMD chip and chipset much more useful than the majority of Intel chips.

# posted by Jakob Michtale 7:05 PM

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