Are PCs past their prime?

[jack]

... The big challenge is, unlike my early PCs in the 1980s, today's PCs use energy like a toaster oven. A Kill-A-Watt P3 revealed that each of my editing PCs uses about 530W at idle, 718W when running Prime95 Torture test, and only drops to about 410W in standby mode.

My 27" iMac/LED/Intel Core i5 uses ~105w at idle according to Kill-A-Watt.
I can get it up to around 150w in bursts while processing large Photoshop files, with iTunes playing,
and other apps in and out of their background processes. Don't have reference for heavy
audio and/or video processing though.

 

[Jay_S]

Computer power supplies are much more efficient than they used to be. So are the latest CPUs. Also, some types of usage place very small demands on the CPU. An example is playing music files. Of course, specific uses such as rendering and gaming have always required more power. But for general home use I think that home PCs use far less power than the old days.

 

[amirm]

Newer generation CPUs and systems are incredibly efficient. My new Core i7 machine's CPU is cold to touch. I don't recall that being true for as long as I remember and I remember a lot!

Finer geometries and a slowed race of pushing clock speed coupled with smart power management has really helped. While my 4 year old dual CPU Core 2 system used to heat my room something silly, the new one generates almost no heat (and noise).

 

[DaveyF]

amirm, my quad core imac is anything BUT cold to the touch...so much so that I once had a very nice conversation with a Mac genius, because I was so concerned about it, who informed me that this is par for the course. The genius ( BTW, I think he was about 17 years of age or so, which seems to be about average Made me feel a LOT older than i am, which is easy to do whenever I go to the Apple store or most places like that these days )He was nice enough to show me how to monitor the core temp and adjust the CPU usage to lower the temp!
It was a pretty technical conversation, so naturally I have forgotten how to since