Low wattage CPUs?

[biff]

I want to get a low wattage CPU I guess just to play at this point but it will either end up as a HTPC or carputer. A while ago I asked about this and was considering hudson stuff but got put onto the 'T' series i3's and i5's. However I can't find any of them now except for the lowest 2100t. Is it just the supply has dried up or is there something else out now that I'm not aware of?

[ilya]

Those models were never in high demand to begin with and the Sandy Bridge models are basically EOL with the new Ivy versions coming down the pipe.

[moocow]

The new Ivy Bridge do have the 45w low voltage T series. The other would be the S which isn't as low power as the T but still lower than the regular and K series.

Ivy Bridge (microarchitecture) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Arinoth]

IF you're looking for an HTPC or a carputer you either want to be going with an Atom processor/board combo (from intel) or an A4/A6 from AMD as those are specifically targetted for low power consumption. My htpc is an A4 (or is it A6) E350 which uses hardly any power whatsoever, hell it uses soo little power from my 150W power brick that when I lost power the unit never turned off as the brick had left over juice for the second my power was down.

[Shadowmeph]

what can those low voltage CPU's handle ?

[Arinoth]

Well the A4/A6s can handle 1080p playback with 0 issues, same goes with web browsing. You just can't really game on them is all.

[biff]

Originally Posted by Arinoth

IF you're looking for an HTPC or a carputer you either want to be going with an Atom processor/board combo (from intel) or an A4/A6 from AMD as those are specifically targetted for low power consumption. My htpc is an A4 (or is it A6) E350 which uses hardly any power whatsoever, hell it uses soo little power from my 150W power brick that when I lost power the unit never turned off as the brick had left over juice for the second my power was down.

Sorry, don't mean to sound like a dick but can you clarify your response a bit? the E350/450 was what I was looking at originally which AFAIK is not the same as the A4/A6 chips. I was initially considering the E350's because of the LOW power usage. If it ends up as a HTPC I want it fully passive cooling and if it goes in the car then every watt counts. The recearch i've been doing on the A4/A6 shows very average (for a standard PC) power consumption of ~90W idle and ~170W loaded.... that wont satisfy either of my requirements and it doesn't sound like your situation at all. I know when I was looking into it earlier that the E350's were much better than the atoms for minimal extra power usage and the i3 'T' series were again much more powerful than the e350's for minimal extra wattage. I think most of what I read put average total system usage at around 30W or so.

I'm not sure if I'd be asking too much of a little e350/450 but if it goes in the car then it'll be playing music, running a GPS, recording a dashcam, and possible other duties.

[Arinoth]

Ah you're not, I sometimes get the AMD products slightly mixed up with their name scheme, for some reason I was thinking the A4/A6 were the same as the E359/450. That's my bad.

Now on topic, I think you're going to run into some issues with the T series i3 if you want to run it completely passive, hell I had issues running a N330 passively in my sega genesis build years ago. It ran rather hot that I had to stick a fan on it just to keep temperature within my comfort zone. This was in a more or less completely sealed device.

Now onto the E350/450. I can tell you from personal experience that the E350 is quite the little work hose. It's able to do 1080p playback without any issues. Onto your own issues, let's see. I have the model that has the fan sunk into it, it helps keep the unit cool even though that's the only way for it to cool (it's in a very small itx case).

Music shouldn't be an issue at all as its very light on the cpu.
Running a gps shouldn't be that much either, as it should only be reading the information from the actual GPS unit (which will be doing all the work). How were you planning on running a gps?
Recording dashcam again shouldn't load it that badly as I doubt you plan on doing 1080p for this, and even then it'll be uncompressed. When you want to compress it that'll be where your apu will be working hard.

I can pull out my wattage meter and see what 1080p playback loading does in turn for power consumption, along with what it idles at. Let me know.

[frontier204]

The E350 should be able to handle those tasks just fine, provided the software you use isn't junk. Its CPU half is a true dual core, and it can essentially run what the Pentium 4 processors of old could run.

I've never run GPS software on a PC so I can't help there, but I can be pretty sure that the CPU will barely be loaded at all by video capture and music playback.
CPUs after ~Pentium 2 barely notice the CPU usage from music playback. Depending on the device you use to capture the video stream, the CPU may not have any encoding to do because the chips in the camera or capture card do the work. To verify my claim, note how your CPU will barely notice a video chat + music playback (assuming you're not using something pre-Windows XP).

[biff]

Thanks... I just hate to question somebody when I'm the one who doesn't know!

I'm not really sure on the whole carputer thing how it all ties together. I'm just getting my feet wet with that. That's why I wanted to pick up a mobo/cpu and a touchscreen and start playing. They have their front ends the same as we have for HTPC's so it's not like starting from scratch. Apparently these front ends have GPS plugins and you just get a USB GPS receiver (or what ever they are) and it'll know what to do with it. Again the same with HTPC front ends, it appears none of them are great at everything so I'm expecting the same learning curve as I had when I got into HTPC's. I just thought It'd be easier if I had the hardware infront of me to hash it out and know what I'm doing before I tear up my car to put it in.

As for the video... I don't know really what the carputer crowd uses. I'm assuming it's eitehr a specialized webcam or something very similar. I expect it will be USB based. For the audio I have a DAC kit somewhere around here that is USB as well.