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