AMD Making a 5 GHz 8-Core Processor At 220 Watts

Vigile writes "It looks like the rumors were true; AMD is going to be selling an FX-9590 processor this month that will hit frequencies as high as 5 GHz. Though originally thought to be an 8-module/16-core part, it turns out that the new CPU will have the same 4-module/8-core design that is found on the current lineup of FX-series processors including the FX-8350. But, with an increase of the maximum Turbo Core speed from 4.2 GHz to 5.0 GHz, the new parts will draw quite a bit more power. You can expect the the FX-9590 to need 220 watts or so to run at those speeds and a pretty hefty cooling solution as well. Performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor so AMD users that can handle the 2.5x increase in power consumption can finally claim performance parity."

Comments

Awesome

[redmid17]

I always wanted to have a computer running my freezer

Re:Awesome

[dicobalt]

It can do both.

Re:Awesome

[redmid17]

No I meant running my freezer. Hence the reason I typed: "I always wanted to have a computer running my freezer" instead of "I always wanted to have a computer running IN my freezer"

Re:Awesome

[ArcherB]

No I meant running my freezer. Hence the reason I typed:

"I always wanted to have a computer running my freezer"

instead of

"I always wanted to have a computer running IN my freezer"

Oh. Then I don't get it.

As a side note, I've always wanted to take an old mini fridge and turn it into a computer case.

Re:Awesome

[trum4n]

Done it. It was fun and functional, but you have to do everything you can to keep the condensation out. Fast a hell tho!

Re:Awesome

[sjames]

There is a type of freezer that can operate using a heat source for power (strange but true).

I'm, guessing that's what he meant anyway.

Re:Awesome

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

i think it would work better running a heated swimming pool, or a grill. But to each their own.

Re:Awesome

[hairyfeet]

I would urge those that wonder WTF AMD is doing copying all the old mistakes Intel did with netburst to read this post by a former employee who lays out exactly why this is happening, the former CEO did the usual Wall street move of slash and burn, get a stock bounce, and cash out.

They are stuck with the Netburst that is Bulldozer/Piledriver/Suckavator or whatever other names they want to give it because the former CEO FIRED everybody that knew how to make a chip over there and replaced them with computer layouts which as you can see blow through power like shit through a goose while giving worse performance on a per watt basis than the previous Stars arch.

This isn't coming from some Intel fanboy, I own and sell nothing but AMD at the shop, but when I can no longer get Stars and Liano chips I'm gonna have to seriously look at Intel because these new designs just suuuuck. There is a good reason why you don't see Thuban chips in most benchmarks against the new chips, its because if you matched clock for clock the Thubans and Denebs will win. That is pretty damned sad, when your old chips are actually better while using less power but the CEO they had closed down production of all the Stars cores (again to get a stock bounce and cash out) so there really is no plan B here.

I just hope the game console chips can give them enough operating capital to keep them afloat while hopefully the new chip designer they hired, the same one that did the Athlon64 and the Apple A6, can come up with a new design to make AMD at least kinda competitive. Until then I'll hang onto to AM3+ and Stars as long as I can and then start looking at the i3s and i5s.

Re:Awesome

[Tough Love]

You got that one wrong. Netburst was about deepening the pipeline to ridiculous extremes in order to ramp the clock. The new AMD story is pure clock ramp via process technology and power management. Big difference there.

Re:Awesome

[gman003]

No, this particular story is analogous to a 2004-era story about Intel releasing a new Pentium IV at yet-higher clocks. The current story is about a clock ramp, but the overarching narrative is the same.

The Bulldozer architecture is fundamentally broken, this time due to simple negligence (mainly in management) rather than a faulty assumption. The only way to get reasonable performance from it is to clock it to high speeds, which gives very diminishing returns. Power consumption scales with the *cube* of the clock speed, so you pretty quickly run into a power/heat wall. They clocked the early ones pretty aggressively already, but at the cost of power and heat (and thus, noise). But it's the same story as the Pentium IV - the smart people are on something else.

AMD seems to be trying to put itself back together. Hopefully the PS4/Xb1 wins will give them enough of a cash flow to keep them solvent until they can get a new architecture out, or at least hammer out the IPC problems with Bulldozer. On the bright side, Intel's been distracted by ARM - they threw away a year's lead on performance to chase idle power draw, which should give AMD a bit of time to catch up on performance on the desktop.

Re:Awesome

[wjcofkc]

Hmm... Makes me wonder if Samsung makes refrigerators. Smart Fridge, burrito please... SMART FRIDGE, BURRITO....! "Waves hands around in open air attempting to open freezer"

Re:Awesome

[steelfood]

On the bright side, Intel's been distracted by ARM - they threw away a year's lead on performance to chase idle power draw, which should give AMD a bit of time to catch up on performance on the desktop.

In the short term, this appears to be a good thing. In the long term, this is very bad for AMD.

The world is moving to low-powered portables. The future of consumer computing will not be on the desk or lap, but in the hand. Workstations will still use desktop chips, but Intel pretty much has that market cornered.

The low-powered, RISC space is where AMD needs to go. It doesn't necessarily have to be ARM. Instead, there's a market for low-powered x86, which is where Intel is going with Haswell. AMD needs to get ahead of the game and create something that is capable of power sipping (which obviously won't be x86), but is also capable of running legacy x86 code at reasonable speeds.

Basically, they need to create a migration path away from x86, which will never be as efficient as ARM and thus has no chance in the portable space. Yes, Intel tried that with Itanic, but they were aiming in the wrong direction (servers).

Re: Awesome

[DigiShaman]

IANAP. I don't think we will ever see CPUs clocked to 10Ghz unless there's some asynchronous timing voodoo used. I'm of the understanding that the speed of light and signal propagation is the real limitation here with regards to higher frequencies.

Re:Awesome

[gman003]

Perhaps "wall" isn't the best term - it's more of rapidly diminishing gains for rapidly increasing costs. People have hit 8GHz, but through liquid nitrogen cooling, which isn't exactly practical for consumer use.

Intel has actually been doing well at maintaining steady performance increases, except with Haswell. But instead of doing it with clock speed hikes, they've been working on IPC and ISA extensions. They've added AVX, to do 256-bit SIMD operations instead of 128-bit SSE. They've done a lot of work on making sure they do as much work per clock cycle as possible - I've seen real-world benchmarks where they exceed 1 instruction per clock. They've been growing the dispatch unit, to let a core have more operations in flight at once. They've optimized instructions, bringing some that took tens of clock cycles to complete into the single digits. They have not been sitting idly by. They may not have focused 100% on raw speed, but performance has been steadily rising by 5-15% per year, even with Haswell.

AMD's problem on the desktop isn't that they use too much power. Their problem is that they're no faster than Intel, often *slower*, while also using more power. You want an efficient computer, you go Intel. You want a powerful computer, you also go Intel, just with a larger checkbook - AMD has nothing that can compete with the higher-end i7s. You only go AMD if you want a cheap computer, or if you want good integrated graphics (which Intel actually is taking a shot at, now, in places).

However, if you are interested in massive clock speeds, you should look into RSFQ computers. Based on superconductors and some weird quantum effects (although it is not a quantum computer), they've had "transistors" oscillate in the 500GHz range. An old NSA study I read expected a first-generation computer based on the technology could reach 50GHz, eventually rising to 100GHz before speed-of-light problems become difficult to solve (at these speeds, a signal would travel only a few millimeters per clock cycle). And it's even power-efficient, running at under a millivolt. Shame they didn't follow up on the tech, as far as we know. I bet that stuff comes back into the spotlight the minute someone finds a room-temperature superconductor, though.

Re:Awesome

[smash]

They do, I have one. It's not a smart fridge.

Re:Awesome

[hairyfeet]

Dude, now you are just being a douche, you really are. Your argument would be like saying "You can't compare any boat sinking to Titanic because that boat wasn't built before 1920!" and it really makes you sound like a pedantic dick, it really does.

As another pointed out Intel did NOT keep adding ever more pipelines to netburst, they just kept ramping up the speed because they didn't have the IPC, with a 5GHz on their roadmap before they pulled the plug. Likewise Amd is ramping up the speed because they don't have the IPC and as other have already pointed out you get THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM you had with netburst, the more you crank the clock on an already inefficient design the more waste power and heat you are gonna have. Intel ended up into 150w territory before they finally gave up on netburst, AMD went from 65w-95w with Athlon64 to now 140W+ and soon to be 220w and again they, just like netburst, are blinding trying to fix the fundamental flaws with the arch by simply cranking up the clocks.

So I'm sorry but everyone else can see the analogy, i could wallpaper this post with websites where tech editors make the exact same comparison to netburst, so if you think the ONLY way anything could be like netburst is by adding a 31 stage pipeline? Well you're just being a dick for the sake of arguing, please stop wasting everyone's time being a pedantic ass.

Re:Awesome

[hairyfeet]

Sadly it wouldn't help friend. read the article by the AMD engineer i linked to, they knew 2 years before Bulldozer there was a serious flaw in the design, the "half core" design requires BOTH the Operating System AND the programs to all be designed with that in mind and even then it will only give a boost in certain niche applications.

The simple fact of the matter is just as Netburst went for raw speed above all with the BD/PD design they made MUCH more primitive cores and thought they could make up for the primitive design by just adding more of them but most programs just won't scale. Even games benefit from having one really powerful core to run the main thread and weaker threads for AI,Sound, etc but the BD/PD design instead has a primitive core that is really only good at integer loads, the second you start adding floating point its gonna bog down.

At the end of the day the BD/PD design is really only good for servers and even then only in certain roles, with desktops and laptops we run just too many FP programs and single threaded programs for very simple weak integer heavy cores to work. This is why they keep cranking the clocks, hoping they can boost the speed enough to make up for that shortcoming but to use a car analogy that would be like saying if you just push this Pinto really REALLY hard it'll keep up with a Porsche, its just not gonna work. hell they have to go for a full 1Ghz higher clock just to beat the Thuban chips which were already not equal to the i7, there is no way in hell they can get the clock high enough to make a half core compete with a full core, its just not gonna work.

Re:Awesome

[TheLink]

On one hand we have Slashdot reader say to hell with hand optimizing software because _THEIR_ own time are so important and let the compiler/interpreters do their job and yet the same people complain that the chip designers should do the exact opposite.

1) There are only a few CPUs.
2) There are at least hundreds of thousands of software programs. Many of which require frequent changes as user demands change.
3) The CPUs affect the performance of all those hundreds of thousands of software.

The CPU layout isn't going to change every few weeks/months. Whereas software often changes every few months.

So it makes more sense to have a relatively few very smart and talented people optimize the CPUs. Than have many programmers "optimize" their programs and too often make them harder to maintain and not much faster.

Hand optimizing certain software like the kernel, high performance drivers, performance critical software does make sense. But for most other programs it does not make sense.

Re:Awesome

[slashdot_commentator]

I suggest that it is about time programmers started getting used to coding in assembly once again.

You can give up right there. The days of humans getting 100x more efficiency out of a CPU using assembler rather than a higher level language are over. Optimizing compilers are able to devise efficiencies at large scale/detail that a human can at this point. Enterprise level software requiring millions of lines of code are just too large to be optimizable by one human writing in assembler. Speed efficiencies with out of order execution, deep pipelines consumer CPUs will be better utilized by compilers able to make better predictive arrangement of code.

Don't get me wrong. You'll always be able to find ONE "John Henry" that will be able to outcode the "stream compiler". But you can't build a world economy on one programmer. And forget about finding COMPETENT assembler programmers. The people you need to extract these kind of efficiencies are like finding prima ballerinas. Sadly, the world's economy needs more mediocre programmers to generate more working code, and more higher-level, software engineers to implement new solutions for problems addressable by a computer.

Re:Awesome

[GigaplexNZ]

I've studied thermodynamics and I'm aware of how the various refrigeration cycles work. My point is that the now widespread vapor-compression cycle does not use a heating element, the old deprecated vapor absorption cycle is what used a heating element of some kind (such as a kerosene wick).

Re:Awesome

[Kjella]

The low-powered, RISC space is where AMD needs to go. It doesn't necessarily have to be ARM. Instead, there's a market for low-powered x86, which is where Intel is going with Haswell. AMD needs to get ahead of the game and create something that is capable of power sipping (which obviously won't be x86)

Actually Intel has already shown they can make x86 phones on par with existing ARM phones, not market leading or anything but middle of the road. You want AMD to out-do ARM and Intel, push a new instruction set, create the compiler support and the industry momentum behind it? With a single, financially troubled company who I wouldn't bet is there five years from now? Yes, Itanic was a huge failure but Intel still makes Itaniums for anyone foolish enough to bet on that horse, AMD couldn't make any such promises. To compare it to US politics x86 and ARM are the republicrats and anything AMD would come up with a third party. They get support on Slashdot but go nowhere in the real world.

but is also capable of running legacy x86 code at reasonable speeds.

If you want a past example that tried just this, see Transmeta with their VLIW design. It did not end well, the x86 code didn't perform and nobody made native VLIW binaries. Besides, AMD has already split their efforts two-way on ARM and x86 which I suspect was a mistake. If you're losing the battle against Intel picking a new one against Samsung, Qualcomm, nVidia, Apple and everyone else making ARM chips still doesn't seem like a good idea. As an x86 supplier they'd have value as an alternative to Intel, in the ARM market they're entirely expendable.

Re:Awesome

[nateman1352]

I starting to fell like a broken record here but seriously Slashdot, I would have thought that this Myth that x86 ISA somehow makes it impossible to build a low power part would be dead by now. ARM is a rather complex instruction set now that they have added SIMD and floating point support. If you look at the number of op-codes it has versus x86 they are roughly equal. Both ISAs have variable length instructions (all recent ARM designs support THUMB) so the decode logic complexity is actually pretty comparable. Also much of the decode logic is implemented in software via microcode on both ISAs.

There is nothing magical about ARM that makes it lower power. The real reason why x86 implementations are so much hotter is because designers of x86 processors have been targeting high compute performance for decades, whereas ARM has been targeting low power for decades. A quick look at Medfield benchmarks show that it is comparable in performance to ARM processors that were current when it was released. Medfield is ~4W active TDP... same as a Exynos 5 Dual ARM CPU. From what we have seen from Merrifield/Bay Trail/Haswell the next gen x86 parts are continuing along this trend.

2013 AMD has a message for 2005 AMD

[CajunArson]

The message is: You got the Megahertz myth wrong! The only myth is that Megahertz isn't important!

Oh, and all that performance-per-watt stuff? You might want to walk that back. Oh and, pull those Youtube videos where you accuse Nvidia users of being fake-pot farmers because their cards pull so much power. Sure it was funny at the time, but we'd rather not have to live that one down now.

Re:2013 AMD has a message for 2005 AMD

[jellomizer]

The problem is they are so many ways to judge performance.
GHZ are good for comparing like processors.
MIPS are good for similar instruction sets.
FLOPS are good for similar code (That uses floating points)

You then add these per watt if you want to show it off for a mobile device.

Re:2013 AMD has a message for 2005 AMD

[CajunArson]

Did you bother to read that graph? Try looking at the bottom where it says "Wattage At the Wall"

You must be an enormous Intel fanboy to think that they have invented technology that allows every single component in the whole computer outside of the CPU to consume zero power in highly-overclocked systems....

Re:2013 AMD has a message for 2005 AMD

[Skarecrow77]

describing cpu speed in ghz is like describing engine speed in rpm. it's technically accurate, but tells you nothing at all about what the product can actually do for you unless you're comparing two different examples of the exact same architecture.

Re:2013 AMD has a message for 2005 AMD

[smash]

That. Increased power = increased battery, UPS, cooling, power bills, carbon taxes and physical space to install it all. All of which are expensive. The most important criteria in a modern datacenter is performance per-watt.

Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Power 6 was running at 5.0ghz 5-6 years ago.

History repeating itself?

[Carnildo]

Why am I having flashbacks to the Pentium 4?

Re:History repeating itself?

[intermodal]

Probably because the cores aren't really cores. They're four cores that are basically hyperthreading.

"Performance should closely match"

[somarilnos]

The summary suggests that the "performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor", but nothing in the article, or anything released about this chip so far, supports that. It's all just guesswork until we see some actual benchmarks from the chip.

I don't honestly expect we're going to be seeing performance parity from this chip (although I'd love it to be true). But that hasn't been AMD's selling point for me for a long time. Chances are, we're going to see a chip that breaks the 5.0 GHz barrier, under-performs relative to Intel's top end chip, but costs about half as much. That's been their game for a long time now, and I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that this chip is changing that.

Re:"Performance should closely match"

[Animats]

The summary suggests that the "performance should closely match the recently released Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell processor", but nothing in the article, or anything released about this chip so far, supports that. It's all just guesswork until we see some actual benchmarks from the chip.

If they're just cranking up the clock speed of an existing design, the performance should be quite predictable. The difficult-to-predict thing is the lifespan of the part. Atoms migrate faster as heat and voltage go up.

The limit on clock speed today is from heat dissipation. AMD got 8GHz out of a CPU a few years ago by cooling with liquid helium, but it's not worth the trouble.

AMD slower / MHz

[SpaceManFlip]

you're probably right - I was slightly shocked recently when I compared the performance benchmarks of an 8-core AMD to a 4-core Intel. I saw the 8-core on sale for about $179 and thought "wow!" but then I was more like "wow...." after seeing the benches.

basically, the 8-core AMD was slower performance-wise the 4-core Intel with the AMD running a few MHz faster

Re:AMD slower / MHz

[hairyfeet]

Yeah but how much was the 4 core Intel? And you can probably buy that 8 core for $150 or less now if you watch the sales. I'm running the Thuban X6 and what did 6 cores cost me? $105 shipped, if you compare like to like the only chip I could get from Intel at $105 was the Pentium Dual core which the X6 outperforms so in that case the bang for the buck squarely landed in the AMD camp.

The problem with the X8s (well other than the arch, see my previous post with a link on why the BD/PD/EX platform is AMD's netburst) is they simply cost too much to make, for every X8 that comes out with all functioning core they probably get 2 dozen X4s or X6s thanks to bad cores so THAT is where the bang for the buck is, although if given a choice I'd take a Deneb or Thuban over Bulldozer any day of the week.

But if you are strictly wanting the most bang for your bucks and like most of us don't have unlimited budgets the best bets would probably be the Athlon X4 for $67 although for an extra $8 I'd probably go for the Phenom II X4 for $75 and for more than 4 cores the best bang is probably the FX6100 for $99 or the Phenom II 1035T X6 for $106. I think in the benches the Thuban beats the FX6100 but both are good deals. Nice thing about the 1035T is I have one and have sold several and with a low end gaming board like the Asrock boards they have a hell of a lot of OCing room, before deciding I didn't want to deal with the temps I had mine up to nearly 3GHz with a turbocore of nearly 3.5GHz. I probably could have gone higher with a better cooler but my apt gets hot enough as it is without adding a major OC to my system.

As you can see though you can still get crazy cheap deals on the AMD side if you just know where to look. These chips have more than enough power to do anything your average person is gonna want to do with a PC, heck my youngest is gaming on a 3.4Ghz Athlon X3 and is quite happy with the performance and with my 1035T I can game AND do a transcode AND burn a DVD at the same time with no slow downs so I would say I'm getting my $105 out of it.

Re:AMD slower / MHz

[Omestes]

basically, the 8-core AMD was slower performance-wise the 4-core Intel with the AMD running a few MHz faster

Take all benchmarks with a grain of salt. While Intel has been generally winning for awhile now, that doesn't really mean AMD is completely inferior. With like chips there are certain things a modern AMD will out-perform Intel on, such as single threaded tasks. Intel will generally smoke AMD on multithreaded tasks, though. There is also cost, while AMD might be 10% less benchmark happy than a like Intel chip, it generally is over 25% less expensive, and will generally run without need to buy a new costly motherboard.

My last big upgrade, several years ago now, the price difference between the AMD (Phenom II 4x 965 Black) and Intel (i7 something or another) was hugely dramatic, considering the fact that I'd need a new motherboard and new RAM on top of the CPU. It was about $300-400 difference (fully upgrading 8gb of RAM, with a new mobo). I took the 10% performance hit, happily. For enthusiast CPUs, you'd best take the hit, and use the cash on a better GPU.

Re:AMD slower / MHz

[Kjella]

The problem with the X8s (well other than the arch, see my previous post with a link on why the BD/PD/EX platform is AMD's netburst) is they simply cost too much to make, for every X8 that comes out with all functioning core they probably get 2 dozen X4s or X6s thanks to bad cores so THAT is where the bang for the buck is, although if given a choice I'd take a Deneb or Thuban over Bulldozer any day of the week.

None of them are good bang for the buck for AMD, the FX-8150/8350 is a big chip of 315 mm^2 versus 216 mm^2 for Sandy Bridge, 160 mm^2 for Ivy Bridge and 177 mm^2 for Haswell. Granted the last two are on 22nm but even the 32nm Sandy Bridge was way smaller than AMD's chip, which means more chips per wafer and lower defect rates. And Intel is planning to move to 14nm next year, so there's absolutely no chance of AMD closing any gap, at best they avoid widening it.

Re:Poor AMD...

[Khyber]

"That 220w figure is not correct, that is why it is so hard to believe. There has never been a cpu with a TDP that high,"

Um, I think the Itanium II MX2 actually got higher than that, with a TDP of 260.

Re:Poor AMD...

[robthebloke]

yeah, this article is guessing at about 125w....

Frying eggs with your CPU is now a feature

[sinij]

Frying eggs with your CPU is now a feature.

New AMD CPU, comes bundled with George Foreman grill heatsink.

Re:Poor AMD...

[ltwally]

According to Wikipedia, AMD is worth $4.5b. Possibly more. Perhaps Apple could convince their shareholders to take less. But we'll call it $4.5b for our purposes.

You think Apple wants to spend that much money to acquire a microprocessor company? A microprocessor company that doesn't even have its own fabrication plants? A microprocessor company that is noticeably lagging behind their main competitors: Intel and nVidia? Whatever your feelings towards AMD, you cannot refute that their market share has been on a decline the past few years, and that the Bulldozer lineup has not been able to resuscitate them.

About the only truly positive aspect for Apple would be that they would also get the ATI assets as well. But that's a double-edged sword. What if the ATI lineup slides? As things are, they can easily switch to nVidia GPU's. If they bought out AMD, they'd have little choice to be to stick with ATI gpu's no matter how good or bad things got.

And let's not forget, there are certainly some folks at Apple that were around for the joys of the G5 series -- another processor that was effectively a space-heater. They had problems with that, and took some flack for that. I imagine they'd like to avoid that unpleasant memory.

Personally, I would be shocked if Apple wanted to spend $4.5b, end a successful relationship with Intel, only to acquire a less efficient and often less powerful CPU lineup without acquiring a chip foundry as well. If there was the fabrication plant in there, then perhaps they could use it to make their own ARM chips for their phones/tablets. But they don't even get that.

Re:Poor AMD...

[bws111]

There are CPUs that draw that much. IBMs EC12 draws about 300 watts.

I don't get it.

[zacherynuk]

When did CPU become a bottleneck? Is there a new version of java or flash I haven't got yet ?

Re:I don't get it.

[zacherynuk]

I am a gamer and my 920 @ 3.5 with twin GTX690's doesn't get touched.
I am a programmer (of sorts) and my striped SSD is still the bottleneck.
I have clients who do geological research and the AMD GPU's do everything for them.

As a user, the only thing that ever fucks me is Adobe, Oracle, HP and the windows print spooler. And these are always flaws.
enlighten me as to you bottlenecks.

Re:I still run software written in 1999

[Anonymous Coward]

Because bacon.

Lets overclock a Core i7-4770K to 5GHz

[Glasswire]

and see how the new AMD chip compares. I assure you the i7 won't need to draw 220W to do this.
Or let's look at performance per watt at normal frequencies where, if the AMD processor really does match a 4770K in raw perf, that will mean the Intel processor will be about 2.5x better on perf / watt.
As some people have mentioned, IBM routinely clocks Power architecture processors into the 4-5GHz range AND they draw several hundred watts each. If you think that's progress, I suggest you'll want to reconsider when you see the net throughput of a dense array of low-wattage Haswells cranking out aggregate SPECcpu numbers far beyond an IBM Power 7+ processor with the same total number of watts the IBM socket draws.

Re:TDP for 4770k == 84W

[viperidaenz]

If something can run at 70C for 100,000 hours, what's the benefit of running it at 40C? So you get more than 11 years of 24/7 use? The oldest CPU I still have is only 9 years old (a trusty Pentium M, circa 2004). You're talking Pentium 4 era.

Heat, over time, only effectively destroys electrolytic capacitors.

just for the record

[slashmydots]

In case any of you forgot, I'm pretty sure Intel's 1366 (2011 socket precursor) i7 extreme edition chips ran at 185 Watts. Their current ones are 130 Watts. 220 beats all that but it's not like Intel never upped the power handling for a forced stable overclock and called it a new chip without really changing much if anything in the infrastructure. It's basically like buying a factory superclocked model graphics card. You're paying for better power handling and guaranteed predone overclocking.

Re:TDP for 4770k == 84W

[smash]

Haswell will still slaughter it on near idle power consumption also.

Re:Poor AMD...

[Shinobi]

One thing that AMD has been doing quite well is total system power consumption. Intel typically beats AMD in actual CPU draw, but then loses its edge once you include the chipsets/etc.

That is not true any more, and hasn't been since Sandy Bridge was released. Since then, the total system power consumption figures has been in favour of Intel except in the extreme low-end, such as against AMD's E-350. However, if you intend to for example build a small server or something for your home, you're better off with a SB/IB low-power Pentium. Only somewhat higher total power draw, especially if you slap in a passively cooled GT220 or something, and much better CPU performance(MUUUUCH better, because the E-350 is a steaming pile of crap in that regard)

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