looking for a "Green" CUDA card...buy now, or wait ??

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
Moderator
Joined: 1 Dec 05
Posts: 6534
Credit: 284710168
RAC: 110462

RE: 75W in a PCIe 1.0 slot,

Message 92641 in response to message 92640

Quote:
75W in a PCIe 1.0 slot, 150W in a 2.0 slot. That said, since all current cards are designed for back compatability if they need >75W they'll have an external power plug, and even a number of cards below the 75W threshhold do the same to hedge against crappy mobos or excessive over clocking.


So maybe the design thinking is for my son's example : a definite 150W ( 2 x 75 ) from the cables as a base amount, plus feed an additional up to ~ 75W from the slot. Thus don't need to assume much at all about the mobo or slot type.

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

DanNeely
DanNeely
Joined: 4 Sep 05
Posts: 1364
Credit: 3562358667
RAC: 1580

RE: RE: 75W in a PCIe 1.0

Message 92642 in response to message 92641

Quote:
Quote:
75W in a PCIe 1.0 slot, 150W in a 2.0 slot. That said, since all current cards are designed for back compatability if they need >75W they'll have an external power plug, and even a number of cards below the 75W threshhold do the same to hedge against crappy mobos or excessive over clocking.

So maybe the design thinking is for my son's example : a definite 150W ( 2 x 75 ) from the cables as a base amount, plus feed an additional up to ~ 75W from the slot. Thus don't need to assume much at all about the mobo or slot type.

Cheers, Mike.

Dunno, higher end cards generally don't have extra cables, but there're 50W max cards with one. If your sons card has two cables it probably does peak in excess of 150W.

DigitalDingus
DigitalDingus
Joined: 15 Oct 06
Posts: 15
Credit: 1105785
RAC: 0

RE: I'm not convinced, why

Message 92643 in response to message 92634

Quote:

I'm not convinced, why should I get a new PSU? The whole point of buying a "green" CUDA card was to not draw excessive power:

I just put a meter on the box, the whole system draws

ca 85 W when idle
ca 170 W under full load (two S5R5 tasks for the CPU and GPUgrid task for the GPU)

This is even better than I had expected.

Note that my CPU is a dual-core AMD 4850e with a TDP of only 45 W, so it's kind of "green" as well.

CU
Bikeman

Well, being green is a philosophical argument. At what point is something green and when it is not. At what point do you say my video card is pulling too much power and so forth. Maybe there's a formula somewhere. We all love formulas. :)

The more processing power you have...the faster your results can be processed and sent...and the faster cures for diseases can be attained. This is the objective right? To process as many units as fast as possible, yeilding some kind of positive benefit towards various diseases?

If you buy a higher-capacity PSU, you won't be automatically using its maximum power draw. It's just that if you need it...it's there, and your system "takes a breath" a lot easier. So, let's say you did buy a 850W PSU. You won't be using 850W. In fact, you'll probably be using less than if you had a PSU of half this rating because of the power distribution and lower amount of strain put on your system altogether.

But, this is just from my experience, so you may not require the type of setup I have.

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
Moderator
Joined: 1 Dec 05
Posts: 6534
Credit: 284710168
RAC: 110462

RE: Well, being green is a

Message 92644 in response to message 92643

Quote:
Well, being green is a philosophical argument. At what point is something green and when it is not. At what point do you say my video card is pulling too much power and so forth. Maybe there's a formula somewhere. We all love formulas. :)


Yes, the physics is clearer than the philosophy or the marketing. :-)

[aside]
I have a neighbour who didn't understand that his hybrid car has to get electricity from somewhere, or that there is such a thing as an end-to-end or full lifetime cost of device manufacture. Alas his discovery of the hiding of costs elsewhere in space or time ( outside of his personal horizon ) has deflated his 'green' pride. And he's a bit grumpy with me too for telling him. The environmental 'badge' that he wears got tarnished rather than polished. Sigh. What a lousy neighbour I am. I fear global warming induced by all the hot air generated by talking about it ..... :-/
[/aside]

To change the state of a circuit quicker then you increase the current and/or the voltage. Processing is a sequence of state changes. Thus P = V x I demands more power for faster processing. Overclockers muck about using this formula all the time. You can get extra 'value' if the diffuse, random energy that is the heat produced has some other 'useful' purpose like heating the room in a cold climate. No doubt, as you say, some boffin has analysed the thermodynamics of calculating in full gory/glorious detail. :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

tullio
tullio
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 2118
Credit: 61407735
RAC: 0

From a thermodynamic point of

From a thermodynamic point of view a computer is nothing but a heater, transforming electricity into heat and producing entropy. To counter this, you must refer to the concept of negative entropy or negentropy, introduced by Claude Shannon at the suggestion of John (Jancsi) von Neumann. The French call ordinateur the computer, since it should produce negentropy and decrease entropy.
Tullio

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
Moderator
Joined: 1 Dec 05
Posts: 6534
Credit: 284710168
RAC: 110462

RE: From a thermodynamic

Message 92646 in response to message 92645

Quote:
From a thermodynamic point of view a computer is nothing but a heater, transforming electricity into heat and producing entropy. To counter this, you must refer to the concept of negative entropy or negentropy, introduced by Claude Shannon at the suggestion of John (Jancsi) von Neumann. The French call ordinateur the computer, since it should produce negentropy and decrease entropy.
Tullio


Well, it's back to closed vs. open systems again. And that entropy decrease in a closed system might just happen - but simply is highly unlikely. ( No system is ever closed .... that's an abstraction, a limiting case to compare against. ) Or if you like it will occur if you wait long enough. After some googleplex of a gazillion times the age of the universe, or some other even worse nasty number, that is. Time symmetric laws don't rule it out. :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

mikey
mikey
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 11889
Credit: 1828130638
RAC: 205558

RE: [aside] I have a

Message 92647 in response to message 92644

Quote:

[aside]
I have a neighbour who didn't understand that his hybrid car has to get electricity from somewhere, or that there is such a thing as an end-to-end or full lifetime cost of device manufacture. Alas his discovery of the hiding of costs elsewhere in space or time ( outside of his personal horizon ) has deflated his 'green' pride. And he's a bit grumpy with me too for telling him. The environmental 'badge' that he wears got tarnished rather than polished. Sigh. What a lousy neighbour I am. I fear global warming induced by all the hot air generated by talking about it ..... :-/
[/aside]
Cheers, Mike.

BUT your neighbor is using less fossil fuel than the rest of us, assuming that most of us still drive regularly fossil fuel vehicles. No your neighbor is not as "green" as he at first thought, but he is greener than I am for instance! He IS making a difference in the Planet! While I have 17 computers crunching and drive an SUV, a Honda but still an SUV, my wife does drive an Accord but is not a Hybrid, my older son drives a Nissan pickup and my younger son drives a Toyota Corolla. No Hybrids in my family yet and I am sorry to say, no more American vehicles either! Quality counted alot for me when I bought my vehicles this time around. I am in my mid fifties and have owned US vehicles in the past and may again in the future, but for me right now it is the foreign manufacturers that provide what I want. Also the Prius is selling in the mid 20 thousand dollar range, the new Chevy Volt will be in the 30 to 40 thousand dollar range!! Toyota is selling all it can make while Chevy is about to declare bankruptcy, is it any wonder why?! In the future we may all be driving Hybrids of one type or another, your neighbor is just ahead of the curve. He just need to remember that rarely is the pointy end of the stick as good as it will be. Cutting edge technology is just that, just short of experimental but still sorta Beta testing.

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
Moderator
Joined: 1 Dec 05
Posts: 6534
Credit: 284710168
RAC: 110462

RE: BUT your neighbor is

Message 92648 in response to message 92647

Quote:
BUT your neighbor is using less fossil fuel than the rest of us, assuming that most of us still drive regularly fossil fuel vehicles. No your neighbor is not as "green" as he at first thought, but he is greener than I am for instance! He IS making a difference in the Planet! While I have 17 computers crunching and drive an SUV, a Honda but still an SUV, my wife does drive an Accord but is not a Hybrid, my older son drives a Nissan pickup and my younger son drives a Toyota Corolla. No Hybrids in my family yet and I am sorry to say, no more American vehicles either! Quality counted alot for me when I bought my vehicles this time around. I am in my mid fifties and have owned US vehicles in the past and may again in the future, but for me right now it is the foreign manufacturers that provide what I want. Also the Prius is selling in the mid 20 thousand dollar range, the new Chevy Volt will be in the 30 to 40 thousand dollar range!! Toyota is selling all it can make while Chevy is about to declare bankruptcy, is it any wonder why?! In the future we may all be driving Hybrids of one type or another, your neighbor is just ahead of the curve. He just need to remember that rarely is the pointy end of the stick as good as it will be. Cutting edge technology is just that, just short of experimental but still sorta Beta testing.


Quite likely he is a better lad than myself - a hydrocarbon junkie by comparison at present. We get Prius here DownUnda, probably a few dozen about in our small-ish town of ~ 5K residents. Helped by the fact that the only new car dealer in town being a Toyota franchise. Tend to be more senior owners who don't have a family to cart about, don't want any great pace or range, nor need much carrying capacity, plus the ease of parking and better fit on smaller blocks like strata title and covenanted medium density developments.

His real disappointment was the less-than-frank disclosure by the dealer. But hey, that's car sales for you. Certainly the economies of scale have not yet kicked in to combat the established paradigm squarely. His purchase pays out the investment in the factory and tooling up, which will make subsequent production cheaper per unit for later entrants. A bleeding edge man for sure. Sound familiar? Pity there's not a Moore's Law for such cars. :-)

Back to CUDA - I'd wait and see, and for very analogous reasons too.

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 686127309
RAC: 577205

Well, atm I run (among

Well, atm I run (among others) a total of six Pentium III cores so I can't claim a green badge as well (I try to compensate by driving a small efficient Diesel car with 104 g/100 km CO2 emission , that is the same as for a first generation Toyota Prius Hybrid).

For the GPU stuff, I think we will be seeing a lot of progress in the next years. It's slowly entering the minds of users that running a GPU at (say) 250 W in 24/7 ops will cost you more than 400 € per year, probably more thanwhat you paid for the board itself, which will increase demand for low power cards by the increasing number of GPU BOINC users.

CU
Bikeman

tullio
tullio
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 2118
Credit: 61407735
RAC: 0

The problem with Diesel

The problem with Diesel engines is that they emit small powders (PM10). Milano is awash in small powders since Milanesi buy many Diesel cars. Also all cars with catalytic converters (most cars now have one) produce N2O, which sunlight transforms in ozone, and smog. AQUA@home has started using CUDA. This is ironic, since the aim of D-wave is to build a quantum computer and all AQUA programs simulate one. But I don't think nVidia has supported them as it has done with SETI.
Tullio

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.