AMD 'Venice' Core Shows Big Drop in Power Needs

dtjohnson writes " Lost Circuits has carefully measured the power consumption of four recent Athlon 64 cores and has found that power consumption has been dramatically reduced in the new 'Venice' core from the relatively-low (compared to Intel P4) numbers of the original 2003 'Clawhammer' core to less than 30 watts under load and less than 10 watts for Windows at idle. This huge power reduction was apparently accomplished by a combination of 90 nm die shrink, Silicon-on-Insulator technology, and something called 'dual-stress liner technology' As Lost Circuits points out, power consumption worldwide has been exploding as more CPUs come online and the CPU power requirements increase so a significant power reduction will reduce the burden on electrical grids everywhere."

Comments

paying twice

[plopez]

Don't forget that in may large server rooms you actually end up paying twice:

1) the first time to power the chips
2) the second time to remove the waste heat in the server room.

the pay off in some cases may be more than originally anticipated.

Re:It keeps getting better

[Glock27]

First, I have to admit I have a preference for Intel. I always have, and I am willing to pay a premium for the name. Back in college, when some tried to save a few bucks and buy Cyrix, the rest of us saw the hell they lived through. Windows NT would NOT work with Cyrix, it kept locking up.

Yes, that all sounds about right but has absolutely zero relevance to today and AMD.

The past few years, I have started meeting some people who are fanatical about AMD, how it is better than Intel. And it is no coincidence, many of these people are die-hard linux users as well. But I remembered the old AMD k-5 chips that used to overheat. My logic was "AMD is following the leader, making imitation chips, they will never be in the lead".

I'm not sure how your "logic" follows, but AMD has had several firsts over the last few years - first to 1 GHz., first with on-chip memory controller, and first with x86-64 instruction set. AMD chips are also the highest performers on pretty much every workload except media encoding/decoding. If you're a gamer, they are the best performers these days. Plus, AMD64 CPUs are rock-solid stable, use less power, run cooler, and cost less for the same level of performance. What's not to like?

I think the #1 problem AMD must overcome is the relationship Intel has with Microsoft. AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS. Intel and Microsoft share information about how the chip will work with the software.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. Microsoft has been up-front about preferring AMD's 64 bit technology, and is using for all their 64 bit servers. Further, AMD is absolutely compatible with Intel, and there haven't been any publicized compatibility issues for quite a while.

And, I guess it is also an issue of name. To this day, I still buy Sony because their TV's were the cadillac of TV's when I was a kid.

Basing your purchases strictly on a company name is a good way to waste money. Do some research and buy the best product. In my opinion, on the PC CPU front, that's AMD.

Oh, one last point about AMD's current lineup - you can purchase a socket 939 motherboard today, and use an inexpensive Athlon 64 CPU for now, then later do a firmware upgrade and install a dual-core replacement once prices come down. Intel has no such upgrade path for its products.