News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School. Parent comment

Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by ScottBurson on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @03:36PM (#10229223)
Just one data point, but I have a machine I run Folding@Home on most of the time, and that is plugged into a Kill-A-Watt. The difference between idle and full folding power is about 70W, as I recall. Not trivial, but 1/5 of what you've estimated here.

15 years ago, the power difference was probably smaller, maybe quite a bit smaller -- modern CPUs are better optimized for low idle power.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by rtkwe on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @04:39PM (#10229698)
You're probably running a much more powerful processor than the school's computers were. The report is from 2009 at the earliest based on the cited forum post. There were some very low TDP processors during the 2000-2009 time frame that were very common in education systems.

Core 2 Duo was <35W TDP and was pretty popular from what I remember. P3 was in the same neighborhood too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by vectorjohn on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @08:33PM (#10230888)
You were looking at laptop Core 2 Duo. Desktop was 65 to 105.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by rtkwe on Thursday September 17, 2015 @08:40AM (#10232985)
Ah my mistake.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by Alupis on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @03:41PM (#10229260)
Most schools don't have "modern" computers (by most definitions of the word "modern" at least).
[ Parent | on HN ]