Thursday, December 13th 2007
AMD Fudges Power Consumption Figures by Making Up Power Consumption Rating System
When AMD released the K10 micro-architecture, which included Phenom and Barcelona, they unfortunately neglected to mention that they had also released an entirely new way to benchmark power consumption and thermal output. AMD's Average CPU Power system, or "ACU" for short, is a new way to measure the amount of power a CPU really requires, and consequently, the heat it puts out. AMD, when asked, claimed that their way of measuring things was comparable to the TDP system. However, independent results reveal otherwise.
AMD's great quad-core Phenom-based Opteron got a reasonable 75W power consumption rating using AMD's system. However, when put under the traditional TDP test, the Opteron quickly heated up to requiring 95W. Stunned, the testers tried again, and the same CPU got a remarkable 115W TDP load. The full version of the chart is available at the source link. For comparison, Intel's biggest and baddest quad-core CPU uses 120W TDP full load.
AMD's great quad-core Phenom-based Opteron got a reasonable 75W power consumption rating using AMD's system. However, when put under the traditional TDP test, the Opteron quickly heated up to requiring 95W. Stunned, the testers tried again, and the same CPU got a remarkable 115W TDP load. The full version of the chart is available at the source link. For comparison, Intel's biggest and baddest quad-core CPU uses 120W TDP full load.