On Wed, May 31, 2000 at 09:09:13AM -0700, Wolfgang Rupprecht wrote:
> Desktop machines consume so much power that it is hard to see the
> power savings when measuring the current of the power supply.  One can
> see the savings by seeing the CPU's temperature drop, but even on a
> power hungry desktop CPU thats probably only a 10watt change out of a
> total of 150watts or so.  It is hardly going to lower one's electric
> bill.

I get your point, but I think your estimate of 150 watts is quite high.
The current hard drives consume only a few watts (except for the 10000
rpm ones), something like 10 W at maximum.  The motherboard can't use
more than a few watts (or the chips would burn :-), a floppy drive uses
less than a watt when idle etc.  The fastest CPU's out there may use
10-20-30 watts (as they need 20-30 amp power supplies at the low voltages).

(Most power is wasted in a CRT, though....)

I *still* hope that the NetBSD kernel will halt the CPU instead of running
an idle loop.  If I want to run rc5, I can do that in user mode.  Let the
kernel save all the power it can.  Please. ;-)

  -jm