Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Looking for some good SPeW!

"System Performance Per Watt Hour" -- SPPWH -- seems like a new and important metric, which Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos and Tom's Hardware deserve kudos for establishing:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-efficiency,2069-12.html#BOM_comments

Surprisingly, no other Google hits for this term exist right now on the internet other than in this article.

Since I constructed the acronym "SPPWH" above, I'm modifying it a bit in hopes of making it's adoption perhaps somewhat viral: "Systems Performance pEr Watt-hour" or "SPeW".

That's what I'm looking for in my next computer: one that's got some good SPeW!

This metric is clearly important when doing computational tasks like protein folding that are divided into work units. A high SPeW rating gives a lower overall power consumption for completing each given work unit. Here, a high SPeW is beneficial to humanity in 2 key ways: providing greater computational power in the effort to cure disease, while consuming fewer planetary resources!

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