[kwlug-disc] The sweet(?) smell of power supplies

[John Johnson]

On 2014-04-07 11:21, L.D. Paniak wrote:
> I suspect you can build a remarkably fast system inside of 150W with a 
> bit of research.  Intel E3-series v3 Xeons/Haswell CPUs pack a pile of 
> performance into 60-80W - at a decent price.  Especially if the 
> software uses recent instruction extensions eg AVX.

Research! A few years ago I bought a discount PC (new not refurb) and 
all went well for a few years. That is, until I tried working with 
Android and the Eclipse Emulator. The tools work run on another box, 
actually an HP Laptop. But the tools would not on the discount PC.

Having a 2nd box was helpful as it sorted out 'finger trouble' at my end.

After a bit of research, I found out that the reason the Android 
emulator would not run on the discount PC was because the processor 
itself was "crippled", i.e. the Intel Pentium processor did not support 
the instructions required by the emulator. Specifically, the SSE2 
capability was missing.

Other application requirements, e.g. CAD, might require AVX capability.

The CPUID register will identify what processor capabilities available. 
There are various tools that will query the CPUID register and generate 
a report.
One of these tools is CHKCPU from: 
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/chkcpu.htm (n.b. The designer 
has a DOS version of CHKCPU.)

Regards
JohnJ
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