IBM at 90nm by Q4?

[Rincewind42]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Stupid Question of the Day

Originally posted by NicoMan
The wattage says it all in terms of power. Once you got that number, frequency and voltage are irrelevant (of course for our processors, the important stuff to start with is the voltage and frequency). I don't want to be pedant, but if you were to remove the heatsink on your microprocessor (don't do it, you risk killing your chip) the microprocessor would probably be a lot hotter (might melt?) than the bulb cause the area of contact with the outside is much larger on the bulb (of course it's gonna depend on what type of bulb we are talking about). Hence the need for heatsink, cause then there is direct contact between the chip and the heatsink (actually there is some sort of heat conducing paste/glue between them) which makes it easier for the chip to release its energy, and the heatsink provides the surface to release the heat to the outside world.

A CPU is typically on the order 100 - 200 square millimeters in size. By comparison the filament in a light bulb is probably about 5 centimeters of wire (coiled) with a thickness of about .1 millimeters. The filament in a light bulb glows at around 2500 C - your typical microprocessor won't go over 50 C when properly cooled, and will blow way, way before getting as hot as the filament in a light bulb (silicon's melting point is "only" 1410 C). So no matter how you calculate it, the working parts of a light bulb are going to be hotter than the working parts of a CPU.

 

[Phil Of Mac]

I FIGURED IT OUT! I'LL MAKE MILLIONS!!!

You make a computer that attaches to a water input for watercooling. You set up a system where the water evaporates, and then you condense it again outside of the computer, thus having both a cooler computer and distilled water!

 

[manu chao]

7457 power consumption

Although I don't believe the numbers for the 7455 refer to the processor used in the Ti-books (there must have been a lower voltage version, and I remember having seen lower numbers) this PDF shows 8 Watts for the 7457 (w/Altivec enabled). That is almost as low as a G3. Now you know why they reduced the capacity of the battery in the new Powerbooks.

 

[yamabushi]

chip design

Energy goes in as electricity, energy comes out as electricity and heat. A lot of this waste heat is the result of wasted clock cycles. Remove the requirement for everything to run at set frequencies and you get more efficient use of power.

Intel once experimented with a clockless Pentium II. It had about twice the performance and about half the heat dissapation of it's clock-bound version. The project was cancelled due to cost, reliability, and motherboard design issues. In this scenario the system bus and memory became the bottlenecks.