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• Why does working processors harder use more electrical power?

  - by GazTheDestroyer

  Back in the mists of time when I started coding, at least as far as I'm aware, processors all used a fixed amount of power. There was no such thing as a processor being "idle". These days there are all sorts of technologies for reducing power usage when the processor is not very busy, mostly by dynamically reducing the clock rate. My question is why does running at a lower clock rate use less power? My mental picture of a processor is of a reference voltage (say 5V) representing a binary 1, and 0V representing 0. Therefore I tend to think of of a constant 5V being applied across the entire chip, with the various logic gates disconnecting this voltage when "off", meaning a constant amount of power is being used. The rate at which these gates are turned on and off seems to have no relation to the power used. I have no doubt this is a hopelessly naive picture, but I am no electrical engineer. Can someone explain what's really going on with frequency scaling, and how it saves power. Are there any other ways that a processor uses more or less power depending on state? eg Does it use more power if more gates are open? How are mobile / low power processors different from their desktop cousins? Are they just simpler (less transistors?), or is there some other fundamental design difference?

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• Do you think we will ever settle on a "standard" platform? [closed]

  - by GazTheDestroyer

  The recent explosion of phone platforms has depressed me (slightly), and made me wonder if we will ever reach any kind of standard for presentation? I don't mean language or IDE. Different languages have different strengths and I can see that there may always be a need for disparity, although I do note that languages are merging somewhat in functionality, with traditional imperitive languages like C++ now supporting things like lambdas. What I'm really talking about is a common presentation mechanism. Before smart phones and tablets came along, the web seemed to be finally becoming a reasonable platform for presenting an application that was globally accessible, not just geographically, but by platform too. Sure there are still (sometimes infuriating) implementation differences and quirks, but if you wrote a decent site you knew it could be accessed on anything from a PC to a phone to a C64 running the right software. "Write Once Run Anywhere" seemed to finally be becoming a reality. However, in the last few years we've seen an explosion of mobile operating systems, and the ubiquitous "app". A good site is no longer enough, you need a native "app", and of course we have a sudden massive disparity in OS, language, and APIs needed to write them as each battles for supremecy. It's kind of weird how the cycle of popularity goes. Mainframes with terminals - thin client. PC - thick client. Web browser - thin client. Phone app - thick(ish) client. I just wonder if you think there will ever be a global standard for clients, or whether the "shiny and different" cycle will always continue along with the battle of the tech du jour.

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• RESTful enums. string or Id?

  - by GazTheDestroyer

  I have a RESTful service that exposes enums. Should I expose them as localised strings, or plain integers? My leaning is toward integers for easy conversion at the service end, but in that case the client needs to grab a list of localised strings from somewhere in order to know what the enums mean. Am I just creating extra steps for nothing? There seems to be little information I can find about which is commonly done in RESTful APIs. EDIT: OK. Let's say I'm writing a website that stores information about people's pets. I could have an AnimalType enum 0 Dog 1 Cat 2 Rabbit etc. When people grab a particular pet resource, say /pets/1, I can either provide a meaningful localised string for the animal type, or just provide the ID and force them to do another look up via a /pets/types resource. Or should I provide both?

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