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AMD 90nm Evaluated
muyuubyou writes "The Tech Report has measured the new 90nm A64 3500+ against its 130nm counterpart and a Pentium 4 3.6Ghz 90nm.
AMD looks way ahead in the 90nm process especially when it comes to power consumption.
Note these are consumptions for the entire system including GeForce 6800 GTs and hefty PSUs. RTFineShortArticle for more detail on the configuration.
Leaving the PC on overnight is probably not a good idea with these new Pentium 4s."
That's impressive. Of course, since it's total system wattage, it'd be nice to have some information about disk usage over the period of time, etc.
I like, though, that the 130nm Athlon 64 is still better than the 90nm P4. It might just be time to buy another desktop.
Can someone elighten me on this? Is there a reason why the SpeedStep and other power-saving methods that are used in most laptops can't be adapted to desktop systems?
The old joke is that all CPUs sleep at the same speed, but after seeing the power consumption graph on this site, it's obvious that "power-hungry CPU" doesn't just mean high heat during gaming. This suckers are hungry even while doing nothing at all
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They found that the Prescott P4, with its emphasis on Mhz, puts out a lot of heat in spite of its 90 nm architecture. The new 90 nm AMD 64 is cooler and uses less energy than the 130 nm version. Great.
But what about performance? The new 90 nm Pentium M processors, the one with the funky names, aren't doing as well in terms of performance scalability because of electron leakage issues. Any such concerns here? How fast can the 90 nm Athlon 64 core go before it dies?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
As the proud owner of an old-school Duron, my computer isn't a problem. However, living in a bachelor pad which happens to be filled with geeks, we have a cable modem.
This makes our house faster than our friends' houses. So their computers migrate there also. And the bastards never remember to turn them off...
Having five or six power-hungry gaming systems around explains much about our recent power bills.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
It used to be that I thought Intel and MS were in bed together (well they were), now I'm beginning to think Linus has signed on - Linux and KDE need all the processor power they can get -- my apologies to the Yoper crowd -- I know they can't even see the boot screen on a 33 Mhz machine.
The ambient temperature in his office was 85 degrees F? I'm breaking a sweat at 72F. When the A/C turns off in our office over the weekend the ambient climbs to about 85 and all of my servers fans are on overdrive. I wonder if that had anything to do with the power consumption in this test, I'm curious to see what the diference is at a more normal operating temperature, say 69 degrees F.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
That would be all fine and dandy, if your average 'gamer' system used 500W of power (especially when sitting idle overnight) I'd say it uses closer to 100-150W of power while idling, most likely less. Which comes out to $7.40/mo I think most of us can swing that.
I use the following rule of thumb:
1W = 1$/yr.
Also, there's an Athlon XP-M 2400+ (1.8GHz) @ 35W. AXMD2400FJQ4C for $87. The 2200+ version is $10 less. It looks like it overclocks well too.
Now, going into suspend or sleep mode, that saves a lot more power, but it can't do that thousands of times a second.
And in case people don't realize it, running things like Seti @Home or RC5 *do* cost them money. Their computer will probably use somewhat less energy if idle than it does when busy.
Also, it gets worse. Not only do you have to pay for the extra power used by your computer, but if you live somewhere hot, you'll have to pay for the extra air conditioning needed (after all, 200 watts of power used by your computer = 200 watts of heat generated.) Somebody told me that as a rule of thumb that 5x the amount of power used to generate the heat is needed to remove it via air conditioning -- so 200 watts of computer = 1000 watts of A/C needed to keep it cool. Can anybody confirm or deny this rule of thumb? -- it sounds like too much to me.)
The problem is, it doesn't use 100 watts more than AMD. The difference at idle is 40 watts.
The 6800GT in their test-bed sucks more power than any CPU they're testing.
And who knows how the various motherboards being tested are affecting the measurements. They aren't even from the same maker (Asus vs Abit). Odd that they take a top tier manufacturer for the AMD tests (Asus), and a manufacturer known for shit (Abit) for the Intel.
Not only that, they have the intel running DDR2 533 vs DDR 400 on the AMD - the memory alone counts for A LOT of the power usage, especially in the mpeg encoding tests.
The AMD rigs use an AGP card, the Intel rigs PCI-E. How does the faster Intel bus affect power usage?
The AMD probably does use less power. I just hate lies and horseshit motivated by some hardon people have for the "underdog".
What was preventing them from taking some accurate measurements?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The one place where your figures aren't quite right is in the air conditioning department. An air conditioner, being a heat pump, just needs to move the heat from one spot to another, and the "typical" phase-change A/C unit is fairly efficient at it.
To put some figures on it, an air conditioner with an EER of 12 means that it can move 12,000 BTUs with 1000 watt-hours of electricity.
Now, 12,000 BTUs is equivalent to 3516 watt-hours of heat. So for every 3,516 watts of heat generation, you'll be expending 1,000 watts to move that heat to the outside of your building. And that's with an EER of 12, some units exist with EERs as high as 17.
So, for every 150 watts of power your computer is using, figure 40 to 60 watts for your A/C.
On the other hand, were you using a peltier device for cooling, you'd be in bad shape. If the EER figure were applied to them, it would be less than 1. For example, to move 30 watts of heat across a peltier, you'd need to apply approximately 45 watts of heat to it - meaning you'd be removing 30 watts from the cold side, but you'd need to remove 75(!) watts from the hot side.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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