Does older hardware use less energy ?

[Coaxialgamer]

So I've been thinking recently : why do older cpus/gpus have tiny heatsinks ?

 

Obviously , you could argue that the chip itself produces less heat.

 

For example , the pentium 3 866 has a 26w TDP .

The geforce 2 mx 400 has a 20w TDP.

The geforce 2  has a MASSIVE die.

 

Now obviously this is because they have way less transistors to accommodate for the ancient manufacturing process .

 

Are cpus and gpus using more energy now than they used to ?

I always thought chips were being more energy efficient , which meant they could do more with the same amount of power.

 

But has power usage really increased since the early 2000's ?

 

I guess my question is : chips today produce much more heat while being much more energy efficient, does this mean they use more power than older chips (Pentium 3 etc )?

 

Because i thought chip manufacturer's goal was to make processors using less power ?

[ZetZet]

No, more. They were just really slow, not many transistors and low clockspeed.

 

 

Pentium 3 contains 9.5 million transistors, not including the 512 Kbytes L2 cache (which adds 25 million transistors), and has dimensions of 12.3 mm by 10.4 mm (128 mm²)

 

New processors have actual BILLIONS of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

[Crowes]

Much more heat? Less energy?

 

My 6600 is on 5% and 19 degrees. My old A10 would be on 5% and 40 degrees.

[Diederik_Gr]

Yes, we do use more power. Through the years we have also gotten bigger power supplies.

[The Official Czex]

Older hardware, while using less power, is much weaker than modern alternatives. Modern hardware is more efficient in terms of its performance per watt ratio.

[Coaxialgamer]

what i mean is that tdp has dramatically increased , but has energy consumption increased too ?

[Coaxialgamer]

I aalso know that hardware has gotten much more efficient due to die shrinks ( p3 == 180nm vs 6700k ==14nm)

[ZetZet]

what i mean is that tdp has dramatically increased , but has energy consumption increased too ?

 

I aalso know that hardware has gotten much more efficient due to die shrinks ( p3 == 180nm vs 6700k ==14nm)

pentium 3 9.5 million transistors. skylake i7 1350 million.

[Coaxialgamer]

pentium 3 9.5 million transistors. skylake i7 1350 million.

that is because of die shrinks and transistor efficiency improvements .

[Kc7vwc]

what i mean is that tdp has dramatically increased , but has energy consumption increased too ?

Consumption hasn't really gone up by much. Look at power supplies - 5 years ago you could get by with 400-500watts tops. Today, a 650 is still a quality PSU, even for a (Non SLI/XFire) gaming system. If consumption scaled like usage, we'd all be rocking 2K watt PSUs.

Computations per watt has increased. Not so much watts used.

[Diederik_Gr]

I aalso know that hardware has gotten much more efficient due to die shrinks ( p3 == 180nm vs 6700k ==14nm)

What companies aim for is performance per watt, in which we have gone forward. We get more performance out of chips, wattage also increases, but the performance per watt is what improves.

[ZetZet]

that is because of die shrinks and transistor efficiency improvements .

yes, so power consumption is way down. imagine to math the transistor count you need 130 pentiums. 130*26=3380W (doesn't work exactly like that, but still)

 

 

atoms would smack that pentium now and they use less than 5w.

[ChrisCross]

well if you compare power to performance the power consumption has dramatically improved and it still does with every generation.

 

its kinda like fuel efficiency in a car. if you wanna compare it use a car with the same performance. you cant compare a ford focus to a mustang

[NinjaJc01]

So I've been thinking recently : why do older cpus/gpus have tiny heatsinks ?

 

Obviously , you could argue that the chip itself produces less heat.

 

For example , the pentium 3 866 has a 26w TDP .

The geforce 2 mx 400 has a 20w TDP.

The geforce 2  has a MASSIVE die.

 

Now obviously this is because they have way less transistors to accommodate for the ancient manufacturing process .

 

Are cpus and gpus using more energy now than they used to ?

I always thought chips were being more energy efficient , which meant they could do more with the same amount of power.

 

But has power usage really increased since the early 2000's ?

 

I guess my question is : chips today produce much more heat while being much more energy efficient, does this mean they use more power than older chips (Pentium 3 etc )?

 

Because i thought chip manufacturer's goal was to make processors using less power ?

More efficient, more power per watt.

[Midnitewarrior4]

from my point of view yes we are using more power, but thats not what we measure efficiency as, say you take a 6600k at whatever wattage, how many older p3 cpus would it take to reach the same power as the i5, now in total which option has the higher wattage tdp ? i could be wrong but this is all my opinion in the matter

[Sauron]

They didn't but they were easier to dissipate because of the higher surface area.

[refinedskillz]

My current Phenom has a TDP of 156w and an intel i5-4460 has a TDP of 96w. So yeah.

[GoodBytes]

while you may find exceptions. Usually, for the performance you actually get for the Wattage, it is less.
Remember. I said PERFORMANCE, not MHz

Take for example your GeForce 2. Do alpha blending (transparency) with it. It will crawl to the ground, consume max power, and take time to process. While your fancy GTX 980, will be like: "huh? what's that? just let me go back to sleep!!! I already done it like 2h ago! Gawsh! So annoying! Always, bugging me... work work work... just leave me alone"

[Vivilacqua1]

Depends. Some have older archat crude that uses more power because it isn't as efficient, but some also don't use as much power.

[Guest]

Does a Pentium 4 beat the i7 4790?

No, actually they use a shitload of power.

[lightningterror]

Does a Pentium 4 beat the i7 4790?

No, actually they use a shitload of power.

I think we all know who's the king in power consumption. and that is the Pentium D's.

[Guest]

I think we all know who's the king in power consumption. and that is the Pentium D's.

Pfft.

 

In all honesty, it is the first gen AMD Opterons.

[turkey3_scratch]

Each consecutive GPU and CPU is starting to use less power. That has been the trend for probably 5 years now.

[BrightCandle]

The power consumption is really related to the square of the voltage times the clock speed. As transistors shrank the voltage dropped a little bit the clock speed grew rapidly. The end result was vastly more power usage. But due to the small size of the die there is a thermal limit of what can be reasonably cooled with air (135W) so processor clockspeed stopped climbing and performance improvements tailed off.

So now in order to get any additional performance from a CPU you must first decrease power consumption to put in the additional transistors that would increase its usage as the small size and voltage drop won't compensate completely.

[KemoKa]

No, they were just easier to cool because of their massive surface area and because they didn't run very quickly at all. A Raspberry Pi these days is far more powerful than processors 20 years ago whilst sipping power through a syringe.

 

The only exception I can think of is the Intel 80186 (the one in the HP x00LX palmtop computers) - those things run for 40 hours on two AA batteries. 40 hours on 6Watt-hours of energy... that's a power consumption rate of about 0.15 watts. Relative to the desktop computers they had back then versus the desktops we have now, we don't have anything like the 200LX. Not even with ARM processors.

 

In terms of overall power consumption, sure, they didn't consume as much power, but power-to-performance-wise, they can't hold a candle to what we have now.