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Old 03-10-2013, 04:52   #1
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Haswell might change my life

Over the last five months we have been gradually eliminating our power hogs and growing our power generation capabilities. As long as it is not rainy for days on end, we can run the boat at anchor without any fossil fuels indefinitely with just 190W of solar and two deep cycle lead acid batteries.

Our last big power hog is the laptop, which on our boat is essential because it is the income generator. There is some really good information on the Internet about laptop power usage. Here is a great article:
Coding Horror: Revisiting "How Much Power Does My Laptop Really Use"?
And a more scientific one:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf
In short, if you are using your laptop (as opposed to letting it idle with the screen on) then then biggest battery killer is the CPU.

I already use a DC to DC power supply so the best way for me to extend my battery life is to throttle the CPU. To do this I simply go into my power settings and change the maximum processor state to 50%.

So why is Haswell going to change my life? The energy efficiency of CPUs in laptops has not been significantly improved in several years. Haswell is the code name of a new processor from Intel that cuts energy consumption by 50%.

The first Haswell laptops are being released now. There should be a good range of Haswell based laptops on the market by the holiday shopping season. I am hoping buying a Haswell based laptop is going to change my life!
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Old 06-10-2013, 00:32   #2
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Re: Haswell might change my life

im going to get one of these i about a month when they come out..

Hands-on: Asus Transformer Book T100 $349 Windows 8.1 tablet (with keyboard) - Liliputing

and it should outperform a high end laptop from a few years ago
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Old 06-10-2013, 00:40   #3
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Re: Haswell might change my life

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im going to get one of these i about a month when they come out..

Hands-on: Asus Transformer Book T100 $349 Windows 8.1 tablet (with keyboard) - Liliputing

and it should outperform a high end laptop from a few years ago
They do. We have an older Asus Seashell 10" notebook on board and the power consumption of half the Dell laptop. In addition the 8-10 hour battery life and smaller lighter size means it goes ashore with us to use someones elses wifi without being a burden carrying it around all day.


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Old 06-10-2013, 05:52   #4
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I had not seen that. Looks great! At $349/399 I am going to see if it works for before getting a Haswell ultra book.

It looks like it has USB charging. That is a huge plus for me because the USB charged devices seem to be much easier on the batteries than the brick charged devices.
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Old 06-10-2013, 06:16   #5
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Re: Haswell might change my life

It certainly has taken a while but Haswell powered laptops and tablets are going to make a big difference for users and may even save Microsoft from fading away. For those users on a boat keeping multiple devices is just more stuff. My laptop has not been aboard for the last two years. However there are natural limits to what can be done with a touch screen tablet. Haswell powered devices will allow real computing aboard. They will not be cheap though. The new Surface Pro2 will still be around a thousand dollars fully equipped. Not something to leave laying around in the cockpit.
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Old 06-10-2013, 06:52   #6
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Re: Haswell might change my life

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ItHowever there are natural limits to what can be done with a touch screen tablet. Haswell powered devices will allow real computing aboard.
for most users the new atoms will be power enough. some simple photoshop or video editing ad a whole host of other functions,

i was doing a test here on an older amd-e350 which should be a bit slower than the new atoms. i can happily have 2 concurrent logins with a patched terminal service, one login playing 1080p in a open source media centre and the other login using open cpn and also running a whole host of background newsgroup programs running in the background. there was no slow down at all.

haswell is nice but i just don't need it and i'm not sure ( unless your playing games) who will need that much power on a boat
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Old 06-10-2013, 07:23   #7
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for most users the new atoms will be power enough. some simple photoshop or video editing ad a whole host of other functions,

i was doing a test here on an older amd-e350 which should be a bit slower than the new atoms. i can happily have 2 concurrent logins with a patched terminal service, one login playing 1080p in a open source media centre and the other login using open cpn and also running a whole host of background newsgroup programs running in the background. there was no slow down at all.

haswell is nice but i just don't need it and i'm not sure ( unless your playing games) who will need that much power on a boat
I agree that properly set up atoms will do a lot. Properly set up however requires more geek ability than most possess. Actually might be a good small business if good code and inexpensive devices can be married. I like the Navionics app I have on this Nexus7...works great. Even though its not Intel, the Nvidia chip gets the job done.
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Old 06-10-2013, 09:52   #8
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for most users the new atoms will be power enough. some simple photoshop or video editing ad a whole host of other functions
Yeah, I think you are right. I was comparing the speed of the chip I have in my current two year old laptop (Sandy Bridge) with the new atoms (Bay Trail).

Looks like Bay Trail is only 15% slower than Sandy Bridge. That's tolerable for me if the power savings are there. Hopefully the SSD will compensate for the loss of processing speed and change from Windows 7 to Windows 8.
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Old 06-10-2013, 10:15   #9
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Gotta say, this is why I like CF. Put a thought or idea out there and you get great feedback and discussion that is relevant to cruisers.
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Old 12-10-2013, 20:14   #10
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Re: Haswell might change my life

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Gotta say, this is why I like CF. Put a thought or idea out there and you get great feedback and discussion that is relevant to cruisers.

At first glance, it would seem so. But if you do some fact checking, you find out that Haswell is not really an improvement in power consumption vs current CPUs.

For example, I just bought a Toshiba Satellite 17.3" S-70A series laptop, custom built for performance. It uses an Intel I7 4700MQ with Haswell architecture (currently the 3rd fastest mobile CPU on the market, 2.4GHz/3.4GHz Turbo behind 4800MQ @ 2.7GHz/3.7GHz and 4900MQ at 2.8GHz/3.8GHz) with a TDP of only 47watts.

However, according to Wikipedia, Haswell is only 6% faster in multi threaded performance over Ivy Bridge, 3% faster overall, but consumes 8% more power and 15* C hotter.


Quote:
Performance[edit]
Compared to Ivy Bridge:

Approximately 8% better vector processing performance.[8]
Up to 6% faster single-threaded performance.
6% faster multi-threaded performance.
Haswell draws around 8% more power under load than Ivy Bridge.[8][9]
Around 15 °C hotter than Ivy Bridge and unable to break 4.2 GHz easily.[10][11]
A 6% increase in sequential CPU performance (eight execution ports per core versus six).[8]
Up to 20% performance increase over the integrated HD4000 GPU (Haswell HD4600 vs Ivy Bridge's built-in Intel HD4000).[8]
Total performance improvement on average is about 3%.[8]
I selected this cpu/model for it's price/performance ratio, but with an eye toward cpu efficiency, especially when they throttle down to just a few watts for most tasks, like email or writing. Currently I'm burning the laptop in with Folding@Home which keeps the CPU @ 100% load 24/7 while folding protein simulations for Stanford.

Along with 8GB RAM and a DVD burner, I replaced the 750GB HDD with a 500GB Samsung 840 series SSD drive, which radically increases overall system speed and responsiveness, while helping to lower power consumption and replacing a spinning platter with a more reliable SSD.

This laptop is the new replacement for my slightly slower 15.6" laptop with i5-2430M (2.4GHz/3.0GHz) with 8GB ram and 256GB SSD. It still feels very fast, only slightly slower than the i7 in most applications, thanks to the SSD.

So for those wanting speed, efficiency and low power consumption, one could buy an Ivy Bridge i7 laptop with a 3630QM or 3635QM processor with a TDP of 45 watts, less heat, and much lower price since it's last year's CPU, yet it's virtually as fast (clock for clock) as much more expensive newer CPUs.

Anyhow, I learned a long time ago in the Navy, "trust, but verify."

As we used to say on the ESM stack, "In God we trust, all others we track!"

LOL
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Old 14-10-2013, 17:48   #11
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Thanks for the info. I've been throttling my CPU to 30% lately and have not noticed any difference in my day to day work, but I have noticed a lot of difference in battery life. But then again it has also been a while since I fired up Eclipse.

Anything that can reduce power consumption is key for me. We have three tablets on board (two Android and one iPad) and they sip power. I have beem wondering about the Asus Transformer T100 running Windows 8.1. Does it sip power like tablets or guzzle power like laptops? At $399 it is probably worth a gamble to find out.
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Old 15-10-2013, 04:37   #12
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Re: Haswell might change my life

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I have beem wondering about the Asus Transformer T100 running Windows 8.1. Does it sip power like tablets or guzzle power like laptops? At $399 it is probably worth a gamble to find out.
it should be pretty low on the power draw. maybe a little more than the ipad but nothing like the i7 laptops. i would have a guess of no more than 10 watts.

the t100 has 11 hr battery life so for a tablet it must be pretty efficient to get that much battery life.

if your going to get the t100 i would recommend getting the 64gig as windows sucks over 20 gig, so a 32gig system would be a little short on space.
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Old 15-10-2013, 05:44   #13
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Re: Haswell might change my life

If you want to reduce power consumption - throttle the CPU and fit a good SSD drive. Turn of wifi and bluetooth. Check what applications are running in the background and clean them out. Turn down the brilliance and turn off the sound.
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