On 30 May 2000, at 14:19, Jukka Marin wrote:

> Umm.. I'm not familiar with all the CPU architectures supported by
> NetBSD,
> but the CPU's usually have power-saving modes which may reduce the power
> consumption to a fraction of the normal level.  Wouldn't an idle loop
> like
> this keep the CPU fully (well, almost) active all the time, raising the
> power consumption to normal levels?
> 
Hi,

this is the same with the RC64 or the seti@home.

> I don't know about the others, but my computers produce more than enough
> heat (and noise) as is, and my laptop's battery doesn't last too long,
> either..
> 
If you are concerned about that (I for instance do not care too much about it), 
than you should not use such programms. They should defenitely not be run 
on a laptop on battery. 

> While I did a similar idle loop on the Amiga to measure CPU idle time,
> I'm now against this because I'm paying my electricity bills myself :-)

I may be wrong, but from what I heard and experienced, the power supply of 
(at least many i386 architectures) will not consume less power if the cpu is 
idle. I had special power supplies, that detected the consumption of the PC 
(that is cpu, harddrives etc.) and if possible would lower the consumption to 
about 30W. Possibly the ATX powersupplies act different here.

mike