3 ms·

I disagree about Intel and AMD getting pretty good at shutting down idle circuits. The more-than-40-watts of idle consumption of the CPU alone in Intel's latest

I disagree about Intel and AMD getting pretty good at shutting down idle circuits. The more-than-40-watts of idle consumption of the CPU alone in Intel's latest i-incarnations is not anything remotely close to "pretty good", even with the hindsight of how things used to be 10 years ago. Here's an interesting fact, btw.: some cores in the P3 family that have a TDP of 15-20 watts can idle at about 2-3 watts - numbers and percentages that the Core 2 and iN architectures don't even come close to.

reitzensteinm 17y ago
I couldn't find any concrete numbers from a resource I trust, but a quick search reveals a few articles: This claims that the idle power consumption of the Quad Core 45nm Nehalems is around 17 watts: http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=1&limit=1&limitstart=8 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo/index.php?option=com_conte... And this one is about a 32nm Westmere (dual core) where the entire system draws 27 watts at the wall when idle: http://anandtech.com/show/2846/4 http://anandtech.com/show/2846/4 Not great considering that the chip isn't doing anything, but definitely not the 40+ you're claiming.
ableal 17y ago
There's a couple of things going there. One of them is that nowadays you have enormous caches (6 MB?) to fill out the chip and wring out performance. Unfortunately, in today's deep submicron processes, you get significant static current which was not a problem ten years ago. (If you put the cache in an ARM, it will have the same power draw.) The other is that the server chips (not to mention laptop) are where to look for the best in power efficiency. For consumer/gamer machines with 200W graphic cards ...