Intel's New Chips, High Power And Low

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @02:01AM from the depends dept.

sebFlyte writes "Centrino has been one of Intel's major successes of late, and they've just released the replacement, Sonoma. ZDNet has stripped the new chipset, and published a review of the new kit with all the technical details of what this new chipset will do for your laptop." ZeroOne42 adds a link to Hardware Zone's exhaustive look at Sonoma, "complete with benchmark results between a Sonoma notebook (Fujitsu E8020) and a Centrino one (Gigabyte N512). Looks like Sonoma is closing up the technological gap between desktops and notebooks." And on the desktop side, foxalopex writes "It seems that Intel's new dual-core CPU chips will have some of the highest wattage ratings ever seen on the X86 CPU market, which, according to Tom, wasn't what they initially said would happen. I guess this isn't too surprising seeing how AMD's been beating them on power usage in the last several revisions of chips."

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Re:130 watts... by Garabito · 2005-01-19 02:40 · Score: 5, Informative

I always found hard to find how much of that consumed power translates onto wasted power (heat dissipation)
Answer: 100%
From an energy perspective, the CPU only converts electricity into heat; it's not like a light bulb that converts x% of the power into light and y% into heat. Energy can't turn into processed instructions.
Now, if you want to know how power efficient is a processor, you'd have to obtain the MIPS-Watts or FLOPS-Watts ratio, and compare these numbers between CPUs.