[nycbug-talk] Power Consumption (was: FreeBSD on Dell PowerEdge 1900)

[Peter Wright]

> Hi Alex, All,
>
> Good info about Xeon power consumption, thanks!  But,
>
> On Oct 18, 2007, at 1:20 AM, Alex Pilosov wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Isaac Levy wrote:
>>> These Xeon's eat power something fierce, so they're bloody all
>>> over the
>>> place, fire sale style...  (especially servers).
>> wrong, that applied to Nocona xeons only. the woodcrests aren't bad.
>>
>> nocona were terrible - from 125 to 180W consumption per CPU,
>> woodcrest are
>> ~65 to 120.
>>
>> woodcrest = same as core2duo, which is fairly decent as far as power
>> consumption
>
> Does anyone know much about where to look regarding power consumption
> for various CPU's?  I'm all thumbs with this stuff, and power is
> becoming a huge problem- (at the datacenter, and heck- even at
> home...)  Specifically:
>
> - What specs, in general, does a person look at for power
> consumption- when buying new hardware?
>
> - Are harddrives generally the same in power consumption?
>
> - Has anyone online created a big matrix of various processor/etc
> specs, with regard to power consumption?
>
> Thanks in advance for any thoughts or URLS...
>


hey .ike - a couple things to look for regarding power consumption (sorry
don't have too many URL's handy ATM)

at this past years Usenix there was a very good discussion regarding
power/heat and data centers.  aside from the wattage of CPU's and the heat
dissipation of these things (while idle and under load - which are very
good metrics) one commonly overlooked metric is the efficiency of power
supplies.  in retrospect it makes total sense, but i believe many people
(especially folks building systems with OTS hardware) overlook power
supplies and instead focus on the rating of their CPU's.

Intel has been doing alot of work on power/heat in DC environments, and
they have been releasing some decent White papers on this stuff.  There
are some very bright people at Intel working on this stuff, so i'd
definatly give their stuff a read:

http://download.intel.com/design/servers/technologies/thermal.pdf

google has many more hits as well.

HTH
-p


-- 
~~oO00Oo~~
Peter Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
www.nomadlogic.org/~pete
310.869.9459