AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+: Competing with Aggressive Pricing
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 20, 2007 3:37 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption
As always, we measured power consumption at two states: at idle sitting at the Vista desktop and under load while running our WME test. At both settings, Cool 'n Quiet/EIST were enabled to keep power consumption down to a minimum, although the biggest difference is made at idle.
Keep in mind that the X2 5000+ listed here is a 65nm Brisbane core, while the rest are 90nm parts. The X2 3800+ is a low power EE SFF core, although still based on AMD's 90nm process; all of the Intel CPUs are 65nm.
At idle, AMD's power consumption is lower than Intel by a few watts. Keep in mind that our E6300 is a particularly bad sample so it showcases the worst possible power consumption for that particular processor.
Under load it's clear that AMD needs 65nm to be competitive with Intel as only the 65nm X2 5000+ is able to draw power similar to that of its Intel counterparts. Note that AMD is at a bit of a disadvantage here as it's running on a more power hungry nForce 590 SLI chipset compared to Intel's P965, but the power requirements at 2.8GHz - 3.0GHz on AMD's 90nm process are quite real.
AMD needs 65nm top to bottom in a bad way; not only will it help ease capacity constraints, but it will also keep AMD from turning into the power hungry chip maker that Intel once was.
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Roy2001 - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
Trouble with 965P? That's rare case. 1st time to me actually. My DS3+E6600 system has yet to give me trouble. My old Athlon systems, both desktop and laptop, do not work very well with USB/PCI wifi card. Laptop need to boot/wake without wifi card inserted and desktop will lost connection once every day.I am not an fanboy, I am just stating the fact. As you can see, I have more AMD systems than Intel system.
johnsonx - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link
Your wifi card problems were far more likely due to the drivers, and possibly the cards themselves, than due to the AMD platform. I've seen both of those problems on all manner of systems, both AMD and Intel. Besides, it just isn't the type of problem I would hang on the platform.JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
P965 at launch was really quite flaky. Many people (me among them) had memory compatibility problems, and not just with elite memory. The BIOS updates have now pretty much fixed any problems, but some of those updates took 2-3 months after launch to fix all of the important stuff (depending on motherboard). And let's not even get into the "DirectX 9" G965 fiasco... I think we're still waiting on drivers that are even remotely able to run DX9 content, and it's still slow at that.Thatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
man i bought myself a couple x2s after the price cuts back then still used a core 2 duo e6600 as a primary but they were so cheap i couldnt help myself had to get a 5600+