Vista power requirements - a disaster in the making???

[13thmonkey]

We've been hearing for months now about the performance requirements for the nice new shiny GUI on windows Vista. And that even Nvidia 6xxx's may not have enough power to run an operating system.

Has anyone been able to test the power requirements of a Vista system compared to an XP system, perferably the same hardware, just with the different OS. In 2-3 years time when Vista becomes a corporate std. will a monster have been created that requires many more watts per office hour to achieve the same functionality but with a nicer looking (perhaps not more functionally effective though) front end.

When looked at across a country how many more megawatts will be required to run under Vista compared to XP.

I'm hoping that they have built in load detection and underclocking mechansisms but I imagine that these are Mobo dependant and not so much dependant on the OS. Is it not time to look at lower power computing solutions, Intel already is, but starting from a very bad position....

Just a thought, I don't have the facilities to test, does anyone out there have the facilities and the time / effort. Sounds like a THG project to me.

I wonder if anyone will read this?

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Meh. My understanding is that it'll be the video RAM itself that poses the biggest hurdle. But I doubt it'll be all that consuming in the end. No one is going to pay five grand for a computer just to get a snazzy OS after all.

Besides, the power consumption problem is going to occur regardless of the OS. Everyone wants more power.

It's like cars and commuting. When people's wallets start to get affected, then they'll start caring.

 

[13thmonkey]

My feeling is that not everyone wants more power, office users and corp users tend not to care I think. At home they might have a kick a&& system, and that is their choice, but is that choice being taken away from corp users?

It might be that as it will all be in hardware it will be so efficient that it actually consume less power than trying to emulate with CPU cycles. perhaps?

 

[slvr_phoenix]

My feeling is that not everyone wants more power, office users and corp users tend not to care I think. At home they might have a kick a&& system, and that is their choice, but is that choice being taken away from corp users?

This is why I don't believe that it'll be all that resource consuming of an OS. M$ isn't dumb enough to piss of that many people. Sure, they're doing a good job of pissing off more and more people so far, but at some point it becomes too much.

It might be that as it will all be in hardware it will be so efficient that it actually consume less power than trying to emulate with CPU cycles. perhaps?

That's an interesting argument, but I don't know... The CPU is still pretty heavily used in graphics anyway. And powering up the full capabilities of a graphics card sucks up electricity too. So I really doubt that it'd consume less power. I'd say likely it'll consume more because it'll use the graphics card more heavily. But who knows. I could always be wrong.