PC Power Management, ACPI Explained In Detail 133
DK writes "Computer performance has increased steadily in recent years, and unfortunately so has power consumption. An ultimate gaming system equipped with a quad-core processor, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 4 sticks of DDR2 memory, and a few hard drives can easily consume 500W without doing anything! To reduce power wastage, the industry standards APM and ACPI have been developed to make our computers work more efficiently. ACPI is the successor of APM and is explained in detail in this article."
OS (Score:2)
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I'm not aware of any OS that requires 500w just to boot.
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Re:OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh Bollocks. Vista might be shit and power hungry, but many laptops with a sub 100w psu will run it just fine.
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PSU wattage (of course) has nothing to do with the speed of the machine. And while Vista is a power hungry beast, I don't think you can specify it's performance needs by stating the minimum wattage of the PSU. One can easily spec out a machine with a (say) 400W PSU that will run Vista just fine. You just need to pick speedy hardware that doesn't eat too much power. That means staying of the uber-high end stuff, which historically always had a bad power to performance ratio.
Besides, i
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The problem with uber-high end stuff is that in two years it's mediocre and there is new uber-high end stuff that uses even more power. So old stuff uses relatively less power than new stuff, but still power consumption goes up over the years wehn you buy new computers. That trend must be broken.
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As for "crapware" I haven't done a clean install but I have uninstalled several items that could be considered crapware. I am however running an antivirus suite (McAfee).
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OTOH, there mig
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I use the "Windows Classic" interface on both Vista and XP, both are clean installs with OEM versions of windows. Guess what, vista boots faster than XP. Also there is no really discernable difference in speed between launching applications between XP and Vista (delay of a 2 or 3 seconds at mo
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People can call me a liar, "call BS" or whatever else. I'm just reporting what I see.
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I have a computer that works just as I've described. Both operating systems are running off the same drive. Boot time isn't my biggest concern either. Starting and running various apps however does. The whole thing feels a lot slower on Vista.
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Re:OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course once you turn on your entertainment system the power consumption (taking the above example) can easily jump to 7GW even with fairly conservative systems. Now try the same simple maths with your fridge, microwave oven, oven clock (in fact any clock) and anything else that consumes power in standby. Add in lights even low wattage ones and your hot water heater (assume electrical off-peak not gas or solar) and the power consumption is massive. With regard to PC's and laptops consumption is dependent on what you have and can vary between 20W to over 1000W, It is possible to put a laptop in standby or sleep mode but this depends on if you are using your laptop as a standalone machine.
So what are we going to do about all that wastage? Well if you pay for your electricity and you want convenience then absolutely nothing and this is what most people will do.
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It usually says less than 1W.
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HCW have a more detailed [hardcoreware.net] article discussing power usage of the current generation, which makes the Wii look impressive from a green or financial perspective - and that's confirmed looking at the last gen [dxgaming.com] numbers vs the 360 which shows the Wii does more with less juice than PS2, GC and DC. It's still using more power than any console before the DC used, but it is a step in the right direction.
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needless to say, in my impetuous youth, I thought she was a nut and eventually ended the relationship.
Now looking back, it makes complete sense... she was just, ahead of th
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Why would you need to heat hot water? Maybe the heater itself is hot? :P
Convenience... (Score:3, Insightful)
After one particularly eye-opening electric bill, I started putting everything on timers, save one computer and my fridge. If I'm asleep or not at home, the power gets cut.
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Math... (Score:2, Informative)
720 h * 1 watt / 1000 (w/kw) = 0.720 kw-h
0.720 kw-h * $0.10 = $0.072 or a little over 7 cents per month.
I just don't know what you were thinking - did you mean to use pesos?
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This leads to a question: do the timers (over a 24 hour period) use less power than the power saved during the portion of the day that the devices are turned off?
ACPI? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, October 2006 saw the release of the latest revision, 3.0b. Still, I agree. This is old news.
Yeah, though the spec dates (IIRC) to the mid-90s. I picked 2002 as a sort of arbitrary date; my circa-2000 PCG-Z505R and circa-2001 Latitude C600 both used (or at least could have their power saving features driven by) APM. I didn't pick up another PC for several years and when I did it was ACPI based, and I had to learn a whole new set of Linux incantations ;)
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That and the page reloads itself what looks like 3-4 times in rapid succession every 30 seconds. Quite annoying.
Not worth reading this crap (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wikipedia ACPI article is better and doesn't shove crappy adds down your throat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Not worth reading this crap (Score:4, Funny)
You go there to read the article? Damn, I go there to enjoy the ads, and that little article paragraph in the middle? It's pissing me off. It's right in the middle, getting in my way, demanding attention, as if I have nothing better to do than read articles all day.
Can't there be site with just the ads and no pesky articles?
And then I found this [milliondol...mepage.com]. Best. Site. Ever.
Million dollar website! (Score:1, Funny)
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I don't know if it's a good idea. The BBC is not a good example: it is paid by UK residents. I get their content "for free".
Not this again (Score:2)
BTW, if you could produce the follow up email from Microsoft that says they did indeed "screw" everyone with ACPI (or
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One of my biggest fans claims:
I'll settle for a link to an authoritative source with an analysis of how ACPI is broken and how it was made so by Microsoft.
You got plenty of them from other people, "the last time" [slashdot.org] you doubted Bill Gate's word. This person [slashdot.org] seems to know what they are talking about and has links to back it up. Of course, you only have to type this [google.com] into Google to get a list of doozies because everyone else in the world seems to have been able to judge Mr. Gates intent from his words and k
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Try again?
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Point still stands, carry on.
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Oh, and as much as I'm sure you'd like to think Bill Gates is personally using twenty sockupuppets to "troll" you, that wasn't me replying to you. How is your sockpuppet [slashdot.org] doing, by the way? Does it get lonely when you don't use it to shill your own posts for a while?
Zillion watt monsters (Score:1, Insightful)
I understand the uber top end being power hungry, but after that?
Why isn't the nVidia line up:
GeForce 8800 GTX-Hyper-turbo-mega-power card extra bonus edition
GeForce 8800 Go
GeForce 8600 Go
I'd pay for a "mobile" chip on a PCI-E board...
Then couple it with a "mobile" processor, some low noise fans, harddisk and whatnot and you get a reasonable but very quiet gaming box.
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How it is supposed to work (Score:4, Insightful)
And on my (admittedly very old) Ubuntu laptop the screen just blacks out for a couple of seconds and then comes back on again. When it was running windows it used to go to sleep fine, but the wireless wouldn't work when it woke up.
I guess other people's mileage probably does vary...
did you get Gate's memo? (Score:2)
Here it is [edge-op.org].
No, I didn't read the fucking article. (Score:5, Insightful)
News? Where?
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but it is nuts and it has volts!
Just not stuff that matters....
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"pci=noacpi"
else I see ethernet cards at bootup time, but the eth0 (etc) goes away (no irq, when you cat
if its that broken - it doesn't seem all that well thought out. (and just WHY doesn't this surprise me?)
oh, and in terms of intel - they're far from perfect as well. I bought an intel mobo ('bad axe 2' model
500W? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that why people don't blink at PS3s and X360s that eat 150-200W when they're idle? I guess that locks me and my 100W/system power budget out of gaming . . .
Seriously, what is it that uses up so much power? I've got a pretty standard dual-core system that idles at about 65W, and I can't push it beyond 150W even when I try.
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If you think that's bad, the new R600 series from ATI/AMD supposedly uses up to 270 watts.
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Your whites.
The G80 chips are general-purpose highly-parallel number-crunchers. Remember the Cell/BE processor? Scale the SPEs down to about half the instruction set with a small register bank. Put 48 of them on one chip.
It'll do your laundry.
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From the summary: "An ultimate gaming system equipped with a quad-core processor, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 4 sticks of DDR2 memory, and a few hard drives can easily consume 500W without doing anything!"
To me, "without doing anything" means idle. Where exactly do these 500W go?
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I used a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure power usage on my two computers. My main computer is a less than 2 year old single-core AMD-64 3800+ with 1 GB RAM, two hard drives, an 83% efficient power supply, a fanless water cooled CPU, a 20 inch flat panel monitor and runs Kubuntu Linux. The monitor uses 40 Watts and the rest of the computer uses about 94 Watts most of the time. In the sleep mode the monitor only uses about 1 Watt. Under heavy use the CPU power usage is much more. I don't like noise, so I ch
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PSU (power supply unit) capacity is being way oversold. A desktop PC just isn't going to break 300W peak unless it is a hard-core gaming machine. Even a decent gaming machine (fast CPU and a single nearly-top-of-the-line GPU) won't break 300W. See here [silentpcreview.com] for examples of what 300W will run. (The thread started ~4 years ago, so you might want to skip to the end.)
H
ACPI is a disaster (Score:5, Informative)
Decent standards: IDE, VGA, PC serial interface, PC parallel interface, PC keyboard interface, UHCI, OHCI, etc.
Now we standardize an interface to non-standard hardware via ACPI. The OS is supposed to run ACPI code (a script) in a complicated interpreter. ACPI code is slow and buggy, and generally gets to do whatever it wants with the hardware. It's like making BIOS calls to do everything, but without even the minor advantage of native code.
This is especially painful for boot loaders. You can't run an ACPI interpreter in a 512-byte boot sector. You probably can't do it in any reasonable boot loader.
This is even painful for power management. For example, OLPC wants to suspend the CPU between every keystroke; that doesn't work so well if you need to run an ACPI code script to do it.
Re:ACPI is a disaster (Score:5, Informative)
There is a standard for these ACPI scripts, as you pointed out it's not great but at least there is one. There's also a compiler for them, written by Intel that complies with the standard.
But most hardware makers don't use Intel's compiler that complies with standards... They use Microsoft's compiler that completely breaks the standards, thus OS authors can't just implement according to Intel's published standards, they have to reverse engineer Microsoft's unpublished variations.
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They implemented a kludgy workaround to get around microsoft's buggy DSDT compiler.
The DSDT in your laptop is still broken, and Ubuntu is now broken-by-design to try and cope with the broken DSDT.
Saying Ubuntu got fixed is effectively blaming Ubuntu for a problem which was never of their causing.
Re:ACPI is a disaster (Score:4, Informative)
About your point about standardizing on an abstract interface of non-standardized hardware, consider:
Finally, to go back to your OLPC example. First of all I am not sure why you would want to put an ACPI interpreter into the boot loader? Is there a reason OLPC is doing this? As for you implying that you need to run ACPI code to suspend the CPU (after each keystroke), this is just not true. C-states (which i assume you are talking about) are entered by simply reading a register for the state, as described by the _CST definition. So all you need to do is parse the definition once, and remember the corresponding registers and never parse the AML code again. Same for T-states or P-states, which are entered by writing to the proper registers. There is no such running "ACPI script" overhead like you've described when handling processor power management.
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ACPI hasn't replaced existing standards, but Intel is using ACPI for most new stuff. We've enjoyed those nice hardware standards. We won't be getting many more. It'll be ACPI function calls.
The configuration part of the spec is not needed. For over a decade, we've been able to handle PCI devices without needing a complicated script interpreter. Even BIOS calls, done at boot, wer
Obligatory linus quote (Score:4, Funny)
From: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds [wikiquote.org]
The Usual Root Cause: Bill Gates. (Score:2)
ACPI sucks because Bill Gates made it that way. [slashdot.org] You can blame Intel for co-operating, but it looks like M$ made it even worse [slashdot.org].
Whatever (Score:5, Informative)
My 4 year old xenon dual processor (Thats two physical CPUs) PC with (~10 fans) with no power management support in the CPUs idles at 200 watts including powering the display and extraneous trinkets attached to the watt meter plugged into my wall.
All new PCs with multiple cores on single processors have power management features and use concideribly less power when idling.
Whats worse is the article spouts all kinds of mostly useless techno crap about power states without providing any context into what it means or useful information in terms of actual OS power settings one can configure to do something about their PCs power usage.
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I also have an older dual xeon with an eps12v supply, etc. I don't think I saw the lcd say any more than 150 watts under load! no graphics - just a server - but its still a dual socket xeon (p4 style, which runs hot) and I know that it sits at 100w and peaks at about
/. invents time-travel (Score:4, Funny)
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Sleep is worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
A good first step is the 80plus [80plus.org] initiative for power supplies. By increasing the power supply from 65-70% to 80-85% efficiency, you gain a decent amount of active power savings right off the top. If you care at all about conservation, make sure to check the efficiency rating of your next power supply.
The people at Intel and AMD have made great strides toward power efficient CPUs, which can scale back their clocks on-demand without noticeably hurting performance, but the real remaining problem areas are in video cards, RAM, and especially hard drives.
The ideal computer would consume almost zero power while sitting there doing "nothing," but be able to wake up at a moment's notice to handle requests from the user or the network. Power management should be hardware-based and completely transparent. ACPI is just a dirty hack that's becoming more useless as network accessibility becomes more important.
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worthless for servers, great for pcs (Score:3, Insightful)
500 Watts? (Score:2)
Performance cost (Score:1)
A solution and a challenge. (Score:2)
The simple answer is to turn off equipment that's not in use. It's easy to start with computers and game consoles, but there are other big power consumers in most homes. Sadly, it is nearly impossible to buy equipment with any knowledge of its power efficiency and the performance of
Agreement. (Score:2)
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Isn't ACPI kinda old news itself? (Score:2)
pc power management? (Score:2)
who cares? let's rather talk about powerpc-management. Or managers with powerpcs. Or pcs with managerpower. Or management by power, not pcs. Or pizza. Or getalife-installenlightenment.