5 ms·

Yes I can unfortunately confirm this. Don't know how much has changed, but about a year ago my current employer evaluated about 10 desktop pcs from dell, lenovo

Yes I can unfortunately confirm this. Don't know how much has changed, but about a year ago my current employer evaluated about 10 desktop pcs from dell, lenovo, hp and the likes as all staff was supposed to get new machines. One of the important criteria was power consumption. The few AMD systems that were among the contestants had absolutely ridiculous idle consumption and weren't even considered any further.

ta988 5y ago
At work people leave their computers and screens on (and unlocked most of the time)... (edit): I tried to educate but nobody really care...
- zymhan 5y ago
  Hence the need for lower idle power consumption
- judge2020 5y ago
  Maybe in your office, but when I was in the office we had a culture of pressing Win+L or the dedicated lock key on the keyboard and letting Windows turn off the display after a minute of being on the lock screen.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Yes I tried to explain both the energy and security reasons behind locking and hibernate/sleep.
  - chefkoch 5y ago
    That's what Group Policy is for.
  - nfriedly 5y ago
    At my job people tend to post silly things in slack, like an "I love ponies" giphy image, when they see someone else's computer unlocked and unattended.
jiggawatts 5y ago
Using local retail electricity prices, the idle power draw of 20-40W for the AMD CPUs comes out to $20-$40 per annum. If THAT breaks the bank, run screaming from your workplace as fast as you possibly can. The bean counters can't count, and they're being penny wise and pound foolish in the worst possible way. AMD CPUs run circles around anything Intel makes. Total performance, performance per core, price/performance, and performance per watt. Giving all of that up for... $20? Seriously?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Must be a company that has the employees turn on their PC and then sit around doing absolutely nothing?
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  For starters, it's almost 30ct per kwh here. But admittedly I don't know what they pay being at 12k employees, size-wise. Most of these computers are being used for mundane office jobs, so I'm fairly certain idling is what these machines do for most of their life. As for performance, I'm still running a third gen i5 at my job from 2012 and actually doing dev work. It's still doing just fine. I think I'll upgrade this time, but I skipped the last 3 models out of laziness.
- bronco21016 5y ago
  Don’t we need far more information before going off like this? Off the top of my head I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. Many offices are hundreds of workstations, mostly idling, and simply navigating multiple different SaaS Web Apps. In that case the primary metrics would seem to be price/performance (don’t need much performance) and idle power consumption. I love the new AMD processors and they’re fantastic for heavy workloads. I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    > I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. That sounds like: "Sure, we make a loss on every unit sold, but we'll make up for that with volume!" If one workstation is better, a hundred workstations is a hundred times better. > I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office. Are they though? My "typical office applications" experience is that thanks to Electron they've become absolutely glacial, and better CPUs make a very noticeable difference even to ordinary staff. People rant and rave about how good the Apple M1 chips are for typical "productivity apps", which is directly comparable to the advantage AMD has over Intel. As a random example of this, our virtual desktops in Azure are Intel-based. They're frustratingly slow. Switching them over to a largely identical AMD instance makes them instantly snappier and very usable. PS: I had the opposite experience a decade ago with Citrix XenApp terminal servers. At the time, a few of our customers tried to save money by using inferior-but-cheaper AMD CPUs. Those servers were glacially slow, and there was nothing we could do to fix it.

ta988 5y ago

At work people leave their computers and screens on (and unlocked most of the time)... (edit): I tried to educate but nobody really care...

zymhan 5y ago
Hence the need for lower idle power consumption
judge2020 5y ago
Maybe in your office, but when I was in the office we had a culture of pressing Win+L or the dedicated lock key on the keyboard and letting Windows turn off the display after a minute of being on the lock screen.
- ta988 5y ago
  Yes I tried to explain both the energy and security reasons behind locking and hibernate/sleep.
- chefkoch 5y ago
  That's what Group Policy is for.
- nfriedly 5y ago
  At my job people tend to post silly things in slack, like an "I love ponies" giphy image, when they see someone else's computer unlocked and unattended.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Using local retail electricity prices, the idle power draw of 20-40W for the AMD CPUs comes out to $20-$40 per annum. If THAT breaks the bank, run screaming from your workplace as fast as you possibly can. The bean counters can't count, and they're being penny wise and pound foolish in the worst possible way. AMD CPUs run circles around anything Intel makes. Total performance, performance per core, price/performance, and performance per watt. Giving all of that up for... $20? Seriously?

Aeolun 5y ago
Must be a company that has the employees turn on their PC and then sit around doing absolutely nothing?
iforgotpassword 5y ago
For starters, it's almost 30ct per kwh here. But admittedly I don't know what they pay being at 12k employees, size-wise. Most of these computers are being used for mundane office jobs, so I'm fairly certain idling is what these machines do for most of their life. As for performance, I'm still running a third gen i5 at my job from 2012 and actually doing dev work. It's still doing just fine. I think I'll upgrade this time, but I skipped the last 3 models out of laziness.
bronco21016 5y ago
Don’t we need far more information before going off like this? Off the top of my head I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. Many offices are hundreds of workstations, mostly idling, and simply navigating multiple different SaaS Web Apps. In that case the primary metrics would seem to be price/performance (don’t need much performance) and idle power consumption. I love the new AMD processors and they’re fantastic for heavy workloads. I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  > I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. That sounds like: "Sure, we make a loss on every unit sold, but we'll make up for that with volume!" If one workstation is better, a hundred workstations is a hundred times better. > I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office. Are they though? My "typical office applications" experience is that thanks to Electron they've become absolutely glacial, and better CPUs make a very noticeable difference even to ordinary staff. People rant and rave about how good the Apple M1 chips are for typical "productivity apps", which is directly comparable to the advantage AMD has over Intel. As a random example of this, our virtual desktops in Azure are Intel-based. They're frustratingly slow. Switching them over to a largely identical AMD instance makes them instantly snappier and very usable. PS: I had the opposite experience a decade ago with Citrix XenApp terminal servers. At the time, a few of our customers tried to save money by using inferior-but-cheaper AMD CPUs. Those servers were glacially slow, and there was nothing we could do to fix it.