Feature Articles

AMD's New Phenom X4 9000 Series

By Vijay Anand - 12 Apr 2008

Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Based on our experience with the server-oriented Barcelona processor, we didn't have much to look forward to in the system power consumption test phase with the Phenom processors, and our results below mimicked our expectations unfortunately.

Idling in Windows Desktop

Using a power meter at the power outlet to collectively measure the entire system's power draw, the Phenom X4 platform consumes up to 30% more power than Intel's 45nm counterparts. Sadly, it even lost out the 65nm processors by 15%.

3DMark06 CPU Test 2

The power savings figures start to get interesting once we start to load the system. In this 3DMark CPU testing routine, the CPU is heavily taxed, but the GPU isn't involved much. As it stands now, a Q6600 is still 15% more power efficient than the Phenom X4 9850 and should you compare the 45nm parts (of which the untested Q9300 belongs), this difference spikes up to nearly 40%. That's quite a substantial difference.

SPECviewperf 10 Full System Loading - Quad Run

From our various ongoing benchmarks day to day, we've identified that the quad-threaded 3dsmax viewset in SPECviewperf 10 to be one of the more taxing scenarios as it maximized all the CPU cores and quite a bit of the GPU as well. It is in fact more taxing than 3DMark06. In such a test scenario, we found that all the new Phenom processor consume up to 25% more power than Intel's Penryn processors.

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