That was an unfortunate typo on my part, I meant to write "isn't excessively difficult..." Some real world examples of specific models of CPU + motherboard + PCI-E NIC combinations with wattage figures at idle load, average load and maximal load would be useful for comparison purposes. On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 8:09 AM Tom Hill <tom@ninjabadger.net> wrote:
On 05/03/2021 00:26, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
A great deal of this discussion could be resolved by the use of a $20 in-line 120VAC watt meter [1] plugged into something as simple as a $500 1U server with some of the DPDK-enabled network cards connected to its PCI-E bus, running DANOS.
I'm fairly sure Etienne-Victor's email made specific reference to wattage measurements in both [2] and [3]. It would be fair to assume that the authors of those (IEEE) papers understood that you could measure wattage at the wall socket, before embarking on a paper regarding power efficiency.
Characterizing the idle load, average usage load, and absolute maximum wattage load of an x86-64 platform is excessively difficult or complicated.
It really isn't, particularly when the high figure is 400% of the low figure. You don't need milliwatt precision to see that your CPU is wasting power while not actually forwarding any packets.
-- Tom