9370 is a dog! Was: Re: Re[2]: Firsts

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Thu Feb 5 08:48:35 1998

> Sounds about right. 11A at 230V is 2.5 kVA, which will do 1.8kW at 0.7 power
> factor (typical for a rectified mains power supply) with ease.
>
>> Still dumped alotta heat! :-) We got cheap electricity in this town.$0.036
>> per KWH vs. about $0.08 or more per KWH outside of the area.
>
> Even $0.08 is less than we pay (typically $0.11). But we can get dual
> tariff systems which charge us the same peak rate and less than half
> that off-peak for heating etc. But I digress.

This sounds like a perfect time to get on my soapbox concerning big
computers and electricity!

Lets say you have this wonderful IBM mainframe and wish to use it. When
you add up all of the DASDs, maybe a terminal or two, perhaps you end up
with a 3 kW system. Now run that value thru your electric bill. I think
that you will find that a night of hacking on your system will cost less
than a ticket to a movie!

And I must admit that I am suprised that the CPU sucks so much. I suppose
if some of the memory was taken out, it would be quite a bit less. My
Sun-4/280 draws a hell of a bunch, but it has 32 megs of 41256 DRAMS,
each one sucking a little bit. Just removing 24 megs from it drops the
power consumption greatly.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Thu Feb 05 1998 - 08:48:35 GMT