Thank you Intel for disabling ECC capabilities on consumer grade CPUs.
With smaller and more dense DRAM chips every year, it takes an even smaller amount of disturbance to flip a bit. ECC needs to go mainsteam yesterday.
With smaller and more dense DRAM chips every year, it takes an even smaller amount of disturbance to flip a bit. ECC needs to go mainsteam yesterday.
Obviously the problem is that Intel has twice the single thread performance, but all modern CPUs are so fast that it's almost irrelevant. And on top of that most of the "actually needs performance" applications are being updated to use the GPU instead of the CPU anyway.
I assume Intel disables ECC in consumer CPUs to help prop up the prices of the Xeon models which are essentially the same CPUs but at a higher price point.
Absolutely.
It's a little-known fact that Celeron, Pentium and i3 processors also support ECC, when used in a motherboard with a server/workstation chipset.
It's just i5s and i7s that are crippled. Cunning.
it usually costs more to power a CPU over its lifetime than it does to buy it, and Intel's been aggressively optimizing the Core architecture's performance per watt to prevent ARM from taking over on products where battery life is important.
Also FWIW if you're holding onto an older chip because it's still "good enough" then you might want to think about upgrading to either of the above. Dual socket Intel Xeon 5160 uses 300 watts at the plug at idle.
ADDED. the "300 Watts" in your (added) second paragraph makes me strongly suspect that the measurements are from the wall socket / power cord. OK, so did you disconnect the power to any disk drives or graphics cards? Anything special about the power supply? (There are special, "green," extra-efficient power supplies.)
Both hard drives were in standby mode (it reduces the power consumption by ~5 watts), though things like that should add the same amount to both systems and make no difference to the relative numbers. If anything I'm biasing against the AMD system because the i5 is using its internal GPU whereas the FX has a low end discrete GPU which I assume is adding five or ten watts to its numbers.
EDIT: back of the envelope calculation
Let's say my CPU runs 12 hours a day and uses 20 watts on average. So, over a month, it is used for 375 hours at 20 watts = 7.5 kwH which roughly costs about 1$.