Talk:Power virus

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I find this concept intriguing. However, I can't find many external sources. The link referenced from the article doesn't actually use the "power virus" term, nor does it actually discuss viral applications of instruction sequences that consume a lot of power.

If the term to describe this kind of program is a neologism, perhaps we should move the article to a more suitable title and make this a redirect. — David Remahl 13:11, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

OK, whatever ... not a pressing matter, it seems. But the first sentence ought to be redone; this thing does not "establish a rating", but rather RUNS the CPU as hot as possible. Not at all the same thing.

 ;Bear 23:17, 28 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How is running a CPU as hot as possible different from just using as much CPU time as possible? Malicious software has always done this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Petchboo (talk • contribs) 19:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It may be possible to use as much CPU time as possible while still being fairly low power. Imagine an in-order CPU, where you just feed it a stream of random loads. It'll have to fetch the data for the loads from memory, which may leave the CPU essentially idle, not computing anything for many cycles waiting on data from memory. Even though the CPU is mostly idle from a hardware perspective, you wouldn't be able to have it do anything else at the same time, so you are using 100% of CPU time on that particular chip.

Now imagine a program which is an even mix of fp, integer, and logic operations, but doesn't load anything from memory. You might be able to fully occupy every single section of the chip and therefore use much more power than the first example, even if you had your program yield on occasion and therefore not use all available CPU time. Forkazoo 23:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)