Technology for Mortals

Update 8/20/2008 – I need to fix my mistake because I quoted some initial informal numbers from Jack that didn’t include the 3.5″ HDD or dual-threaded tests.  Now that the I have his full data set, I’m need to make some corrections.  I apologize for my mistake and I will fix it below, but my insistance that Tomshardware is off by a LOT has not changed though I was wrong about saying the Intel 945GC/Atom board could run on 802.3af.  Tomshardware on the other hand only did NOT correct the mistake despite acknowledging my emails to them, they went ahead and and published more results using an 850W power supply which is horrendously stupid.

For those who are going to say that Thorn who critized me in the comment section was right all along despite the fact that he did not run ANY tests, he was still wrong by a long shot because he insisted that the Tomshardware numbers aren’t that far off.  It turns out that Toms hardware was off by 25.6W from the Sparkle 220W power supply and my hasty post based on informal data that mistakenly excluded the hard drives was off by 11 W.  Let this be a lesson to me for posting informal data and once again, I apologize to my readers for my mistake.

After praising Tomshardware for doing a good job fixing their flash storage efficiency article, I must point out that Tomshardware’s made another horrendous error by claiming that and Intel D945GCLF system with an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor consumes 59W idle power.  Mr. Dandumont who authored the article claims that he used an “80 Plus” power supply implying that he was getting at least 80% efficiency on the PSU (Power Supply Unit) but that is a huge mistake.

UPDATE 7/21/2008 – Tomshardware’s Senior Editor Matthieu Lamelot has responded that they used the Tagan EasyCon U15 530 W power supply.  My 600W guess was fairly close and it means that Tomshardware loaded their PSU to roughly 3.6% load and that translates to roughly 30% efficiency which makes their benchmarks very inaccurate and misleading.  Tomshardware should at least test with a good 80 Plus 220W PSU but ideally they should test with a sub-100W PicoPSU.

The 80 Plus rating only claims greater than 80% efficiency if you’re talking about workloads between 20% to 100% output power and my guess is that Mr. Dandumont used a 600+ watt PSU which means he was likely loading the system at less than 3% workload.  3% workload on a PSU translates to a horrendous efficiency of less than 30%.

Tomshardware claims that the same system with a 7200 RPM 3.5″ hard drive consumes 59W idle and 62W peak using an energy efficient power supply but this isn’t even in the ballpark in terms of accuracy.  Tomshardware needs to correct this error and start using some more appropriate and smaller power supplies for testing computers that draw less than 50 watts of output power.

Update 8/20/2008 – My PhD friend Jack who is a very knowledgeable and meticulous tester tested the Intel D945GCLF with a Sparkle SPI220LE 220W PSU and got a measurement of 34W idle and 36.4W peak input power consumption.  Since the “80 Plus” SPI220LE gets around 73% efficiency at 19.2W output load according to Silent PC Review, we can reasonably estimate at 75% efficiency that the entire system actually consumes ~27W output power from the PSU.

Without the hard drive, the system peaked at 27.2W which means the output power from the PSU would be ~20W which is too much for 802.2af PoE.  The Intel 945GC chipset is unfortunately a bit power hungry so when the next version of Atom with on-die controller and graphics built in to the CPU, we can hopefully see the output power requirement dive down below 10W but until then, 802.3af is out of the question.

The SPI220LE is above 80% efficiency when the output load level is above 20% and here we’re only at around 8.1% load level so the efficiency drops.  I’ve done some testing with the Sparkle 55W Open Frame PSU and found that it runs at around 80% efficiency for the Intel 945GC/Atom board despite the fact that it’s not 80 Plus certified.  This is because the 55W PSU is running at optimum load levels.

Intel’s new sub-2.5 watt Atom CPU (codenamed Silverthorne) is showing it can run two process threads at the same time better than competing processors.  The Atom’s hyperthreading feature (in-order SMT) allows the single-core processor to be seen as two logical processors by an operating system.  When both processors are used whenever more than one task is being performed in the computer, substantial gains in performance can be made.

According to these slides presented at IDF on page 17, the Atom is showing an whopping 39% performance gain on SPECint_rate2000 when running two process threads at a mere 17% increase in power consumption.  Hexus.net found that the Atom’s hyperthreading feature allowed it to improve CINEBENCH 9.5 performance by more than 53%.  It should be noted that SPECint_rate2000 doesn’t really stress the memory subsystem so one would expect the SPECint_rate2006 gains on Atom hyperthreading to be lower.  However it’s not really practical to expect a small mobile or embedded device to have 4 Gigabytes of RAM with high memory bandwidth.

Some like Linus Torvalds criticized these Hyperthreading results because he feels that good Hyperthreading performance could be viewed in the glass-half-empty perspective of poor single-threaded performance.  I disagree with him because having a second processor is very beneficial to a computer especially when a single process locks up.  Modern compilers also have the auto-parallelization features that will try to take advantage of the second processor for single-threaded applications.

The closest competitor for the Intel Atom is Via’s Isaiah processor.  Recent benchmarks from Eeepcnew.de seem to have indicated that Via’s C7 Isaiah processor performs approximately 39% better on raw integer performance and approximately 3.5% better on raw floating point performance.  While the Isaiah processor performs well and has reasonable power consumption for a desktop and some larger notebooks, it consumes nearly 10 times more power than the Intel Atom.  Furthermore, the results from Eeepcnew.de are for single threading so once you factor in SMT performance gains, the Atom may actually perform better than the Isaiah.