In article , Arfa Daily
wrote:


Is it a longterm ' problem ' that PC CPUs still draw amps ?

Depends in part on your views on paying your electricity bill, and 'global
warming'... :-)

Also on noting that the failiure rates for semiconductor devices tends to
depend on their operating temperatures.


The thing is with digital circuitry, as it gets faster, the circuitry
gets more and more power hungry, in order to maintain the slew rates
required. Look how the size of coolers on CPUs has increased over the
years.

Oddly enough, the CPUs in the computers I use don't have 'coolers' and
don't even get hot to the touch. ;- But then they are RISC chips with
quite low power consumptions, etc.


I guess that there probably will be improvements in power consumption
with these DAB radios, but I wouldn't hold my breath as to how quickly.
They've been around for a while now, and I don't see any neat little '
Walkman ' style ones about.

Well, I have one of the cheap 'DAB adaptors' that is quite small. However
its wall-wart PSU gets warm with use. Mind you, that seems to be more a
function of transformer inefficiency and size than anything else.

The other thing that I've found with the ones that have crossed my path,
is that they suffer very much from go / no go syndrome, a bit like
digital TV. Reception can be perfect, as you would expect, but move the
antenna a gnat's bollock, and it's gone. This begs the question as to
whether the manufacturers are deliberately not developing these things
into truly portable units, because people will then try to carry them
around with them, and the system is just not robust enough to provide
error free reception under these conditions.

One of the original aims of DAB was portability...

Slainte,

Jim

--
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Audio Misc http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/AudioMisc/index.html
Armstrong Audio http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/Audio/armstrong.html
Barbirolli Soc. http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/JBSoc/JBSoc.html