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Changing for the Future - Intel's Core i7

By Vincent Chang - 3 Nov 2008

Power Consumption

Power Consumption

Before we talk about the power consumption results, we have to say that we were unable to get the Core i7 and the X58 motherboard to enter the idle state. We didn't notice any frequency or power throttling when idling in desktop like the other Core 2 Extreme CPUs. As a result, the 'idle' results returned by the Core i7 were all higher than the other Intel processors, though the AMD Phenom still took the unwanted tag of being the most power hungry CPU.

When running at peak in both 3DMark06 and SPECviewperf 10, the Core i7 consumed marginally less power than the QX9770, though turning off SMT had rather contradictory effects on the power consumption numbers. Again, it does look like SMT has quite the impact, even here for the power consumption testing and it depends very much on the actual workload, with the SPECviewperf test probably utilizing the SMT more fully.

Overall, it certainly looks like the Core i7 has higher performance potential at similar or less power draw than the previous Core 2 architecture and platform.

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