Ivy Bridge Power Consumption

This is a preliminary attempt at characterizing the power consumption of Ivy Bridge at various clock frequencies and loads. I present plots of CPU power consumption (at the 12V connector) at varying frequency, voltage, and number of cores utilized, including the power impact of Hyper-Threading. . . . → Read More: Ivy Bridge Power Consumption

Ivy Bridge Benchmarks

So I got myself a new Core i7-3770K, using the stock heatsink/fan, and a motherboard that doesn’t have VCore adjustments. I re-ran a bunch of benchmarks used in my earlier posts to measure Ivy Bridge’s performance, and Hyper-threading scaling, in comparison to earlier processors. The workloads were used in the my earlier tests:

. . . → Read More: Ivy Bridge Benchmarks

Ivy Bridge De-lidding

There has been much speculation recently about why Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors seem to run significantly hotter than the previous-generation Sandy Bridge processors, despite the lowered TDP rating. One proposed explanation is that the thermal interface material between the silicon die and heat spreader was changed: Sandy Bridge processors soldered the heat spreader to the silicon, while Ivy Bridge processors use some silicone-like adhesive compound. I pop off the heat spreader and do some measurements. . . . → Read More: Ivy Bridge De-lidding

Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H Motherboard

Gigabyte makes several similar MicroATX motherboards with the Intel Z77 chipset:

  • GA-Z77M-D3H
  • GA-Z77M-D3H-MVP
  • GA-Z77MX-D3H

The first two do not have manual adjustment of VCore. This is a failed attempt at trying to use the GA-Z77MX-D3H firmware to enable them. . . . → Read More: Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H Motherboard

Thinkpad X61 Tablet LCD Bubbles

The Lenovo Thinkpad X61 tablet with the “12.1-in Super Wide Angle SXGA+ TFT display with 1400 x 1050 resolution” option uses a BOE-Hydis HV121P01-101 AFFS display with glass bonded to the LCD panel. The display is prone to developing bubbles in the adhesive layer in between the LCD and glass. There’s a long thread at Lenovo forums about the bubbles and the difficulty of getting it replaced or repaired. Here’s my case of bubbles . . . → Read More: Thinkpad X61 Tablet LCD Bubbles

Ikea “Laver” Chair repair

Ikea “Laver” chair. $10. Metal frame, “PP-CO” (polypropylene/polyethylene copolymer?) seat and back. Spots near the two front corners are high-stress and fail (crack) easily. This is a repair attempt . . . → Read More: Ikea “Laver” Chair repair

Mediawiki Parsers

A parser is used to translate wikitext to HTML for viewing. Since there are a bunch of parser projects for MediaWiki’s markup, I’ll go benchmark some of them to see how fast they run.

. . . → Read More: Mediawiki Parsers

Samsung Linux CUPS USB Printing

Ever since upgrading from Mandriva 2010.0(?) to 2010.1 (and also 2010.2), both of my Samsung laser printers have been intermittent. Print jobs would often be silently discarded. CUPS logs show that the print jobs are completed, the printer would warm up, the printer’s LED blinks once or twice, then the print job is “complete”. But nothing gets printed. . . . → Read More: Samsung Linux CUPS USB Printing

Teksavvy MLPPP Performance

MLPPP on Bell’s DSL GAS network doesn’t work very well because the GAS network appears to reorder PPP frames (which is forbidden by RFC 1661). Ideally, Bell should stop reordering packets. The next best option is for the ISP and user to configure MRU and MRRU settings to reduce packet/frame fragmentation. With multilink PPPoE, the client should use an IP-MTU of 1486 bytes (1484 on Linux 2.6.31+ due to a bug), a MRU of 1492, and an MRRU of 1486. The ISP should use an MRU of 1492, MRRU of 1486 (possibly 1484 to work around the Linux bug, until the bug gets fixed), and apply the IP-MTU correctly (MRU-0 = 1492 for PPP, MRU-6 = 1486 for MLPPP). . . . → Read More: Teksavvy MLPPP Performance

Hyper-Threading Performance

Intel uses Hyper-Threading (HT) as a feature for market segmentation: The desktop Core i5 processors differ from the Core i7 mainly by whether HT has been disabled, and Intel charges a significant price premium for the Core i7. Does the performance improvement of HT justify its cost? I test the performance of HT using a selection of cluster-type workloads. . . . → Read More: Hyper-Threading Performance