New Xeon CPU Hot and Underpowered

Kasracer writes "Web Sites The Register and GamePC received several of the new dual-core processors from Intel, dubbed 'Paxville', and ran a battery of tests on them. What did they find? From the article: 'There's no doubt about it, Intel's dual-core Xeons are their most power hungry Xeons to date ... Even when idling, two dual-core Xeons consume nearly 400W of power at any given time, which is amazingly high, even by Intel's standards ... their new dual-core chips (while powerful in their own right) simply are bested across the board by AMD's dual-core Opteron processors. Even worse, the Opterons typically perform much better while running at slower clock speeds and only having half the amount of on-die L2 cache to utilize.'"

Comments

Intel catching up with 65 nm?

[miffo.swe]

I cant see how Intel is going to catch up without a redraw of the whole CPU structure and mem controller. Simply going for smaller die wont solve the performance problem. I really think Michael Dell was wrong in thinking that 65 nm is going to get Intel in par with AMD. This is really and interesting moment, will dell stick to Intel and deliver less performance than HP/Intel/Sun etc? At some stage they will have to start selling AMD and i suspect it will be a horrific moment for Dell. To date they always state that they use Intel because they are better but really how long can they put that charade up?

Re:Becoming a consumer issue?

[WuphonsReach]

Yeah, it's already started. I'd say about 2 years ago.

The first wave of it was folks starting to harp about the amount of noise that most PCs make. While the Mini-ITX folks were already using fanless systems to reduce noise in specialized application, I think the fanless iMac gave momentum to the movement. At least, that little acryllic cube was cool enough to generate lots of press about being nearly silent.

Then there were the folks that started buying laptops instead of desktops due to the noise / form-factor / lifestyle choices. Laptops are easier to hide away, can be setup anywhere in the house on a whim, and laptops used to be pretty quiet.

Hard drive manufacturers switched over to fluid bearing drives a few years ago. At first, it was a marketing thing that allowed them to differentiate themselves from the pack. Now, I don't think you can find too many drive makers who are still making noisy ball bearing drives.

Energy costs have also gone up in the past few years. My electricty bill has gone from ~$40/mo up to ~$120/mo and I'm starting to consider whether I really want 4 servers, 3 desktops and a laptop running all the time. (And whether I can pack more storage into fewer watts.) Plus the heat issues that all of those systems cause.

PCs are also continuing to move further and further out of the office. As you moving into the living room / kitchen, folks start paying closer attention to noise / power / heat issues. And PCs have gotten powerful enough over the years, that they are "fast enough" for a lot of tasks. They're starting to compete against things like VCRs / DVD players / DVR & PVR (devices which are typically dead-quiet, low-power, and low-heat).

Dell even started selling "quiet" PCs a few years ago (most quiet PCs are also lower energy and lower temperature). Those are nice in an office setting for lowering the ambient noise level (which leads to a less-stressful environment).