[SGVLUG] bit order (was Linux based web-server appliance)

[Michael Proctor-Smith]

On 5/24/06, Dustin Laurence <dustin at laurences.net> wrote:
--snipping math
> > -----------------------topic change-----------------------------------
> > >
> > > Anyway, nobody cared about CPU consumption in that era and so it
> > > wasn't optimized.
> >
> > The people who made my 486 cared since they had a "green" model which
> > had very low consumption which was advertised in the MB manual with
> > estimates for the HD and monitor.
>
> While it's a good point about the drive an monitor, and I'm sure you're
> right that the monitor was designed to save energy, I doubt very much
> that applies to the CPU design itself.  Do you care to argue that Intel,
> which didn't publicly care about power consumption on the desktop until
> the P4's started to dissipate ~200W, was worrying about power
> consumption in the 486 era?  I really don't think so.

> > But what about the consumption per hour?
>
> If that were the only consideration I'd just use a slide rule.
>
> Dustin, who dissipates >= 70W.

They actually some what did. First they added halt
instruction(something like that) which lowered total power usage when
the system is idle. I don't think most OSs supported it or used it.
There was also a lower power chip 3.3V version instead of 5V, and
maybe a 2.5V. But "Green" just was incomarison to the Massive amount
of power used by the non-green version. Fact is a Modern PDA has
multiple times the processing power of your 486 and uses a fraction of
the power per hour.