Re: [PATCH] Add p4-clockmod driver in x86-64

From: Paulo Marques
Date: Wed Oct 27 2004 - 11:19:34 EST


Lee Revell wrote:
On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 15:59 +0100, Paulo Marques wrote:

I am one of the members of the robotic soccer team from the University of Oporto, and a couple of months ago we were looking for new motherboards for our robots, because we are starting to need new hardware (on-board lan, usb2.0, etc.).

We really don't need excepcional performance, but we really, really need low power consumption, so lowering the clock on a standard mainboard seemed to be the best cost/performance scenario.

Could this driver be used to keep a standard p4 processor at say 25% clock speed at all times?



Why don't you try the VIA EPIA mini-ITX boards? These are designed for
low power applications like yours. I am running the M-6000 which has a
fanless 600Mhz C3 processor, the newer fanless models run at 1Ghz. And,
on top of that they support speed scaling so you can slow it down even
more.

Yes, we tried those, but floating point calculations completely kill the performance on those boards.

Even at 25% speed a P4 2.8GHz gives a 700MHz clock which completely toasts a 600MHz (or even a 1GHz) C3 in floating point calculations... :(

Even more, I can get a Asus mainboard with integrated VGA, LAN, USB, Audio, for half the price of a VIA EPIA mini-ITX with comparable integer performance. As we always have to buy these things in quantities of 5, this can make some difference.

--
Paulo Marques - www.grupopie.com

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)
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