HappySqurriel said:
It wouldn't have to be at the lowest possible clock speed ... The relationship between clock speed and energy consumption/heat is an exponential one. Back 'at the turn of the century' people were building their own home theater PCs and hooking them up to their TVs. Since you needed a relatively powerful system to do this, and these generally ran pretty hot and required fans that were loud people were underclocking and undervolting their systems to reduce power consumption. http://www.silentpcreview.com/article37-page1.html Various Undervolted & Underclocked Settings Achieved
By reducing the clock speed by 40% people were able to achieve a (over) 70% reduction in energy consumption. This act of underclocking a processor is (essentially) what is done to create laptop CPUs, and in laptops they generally run the CPU at (roughly) half the clockspeed of their desktop counterparts. The advantage Nintendo has is they can reduce the number of cores and underclock it to get energy consumption down and. while an 8 core Power7 chips running at 4.25GHz would run far too hot for any console, a 4 core Power7 chip running below 3GHz would probably be appropriate for many consoles. |
Not really. The relationship is quadratic with the voltage, it's linear with the speed. Your power consumption grows exponentially because you need to apply much higher vcores to reach a very high frequency, but the most important factor to the power consumption is the vcore. If you keep constant the vcore, a 15% lower frequency grants you ~15% lower power consumption.
