AMD's Phenom X4 9950, 9350e and 9150e: Lower Prices, Voltage Tricks and Strange Behavior
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on July 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption
For our power consumption numbers we only used a subset of CPUs that we actually had (rather than underclocking CPUs to simulate others). First off, we'll look at a comparison of the important CPU datapoints. :
With the exception of the Q9300, Intel's competing chips draw less power at idle than even the new energy efficient AMD chips. Cool'n'Quiet was enabled here despite the performance impacts we mentioned earlier.
Under load we see the gap widen - Intel's 45nm process simply gives it the edge in power consumption. Note that the CPU is only being used to decrypt and stream data to the GPU here while we're watching a H.264 encoded Blu-ray (The Simpsons).
The trend does mostly continue in a more CPU-bound test. The chips are all fairly close in power consumption but AMD doesn't have the advantage here.
The next set of tests is particularly interesting as we are comparing Intel's top integrated graphics platform (G35) to AMD's (780G). No external graphics card was used, this is strictly an IGP comparison:
AMD does a bit better here at idle, but look at what happens while we watch a Blu-ray:
Intel's G35 doesn't have any H.264 decode acceleration, meaning the CPU is forced to handle the entire decode process - thus Phenom gets a bit of a break. It is funny that despite handling all of the Blu-ray decoding, the E7200 actually pulls less power than the Phenom X4 9550 with hardware acceleration.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
Regs - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Between cool n' quite and flimsy power management, it just seems like AMD overshot their goals. Though to me, it seems like they could easily be fixed in Shanghai, but that's if they can keep all four cores busy instead I have 3 cores at stall, and one pumping at max in threaded or shared instruction instances. This will though cause more power consumption, and I think you guys all ready said that mobo support is just not their to power these suckers. You can have your cake, you just cant eat it.What do you goes think about AMD at 2.6 GHz? Looks more competitive stacked up to Intel's finniest at the given price point. Just makes me wonder if the over complicated power management features are keeping AMD from hitting 3.0 GHz or above. What do you think is holding AMD back?
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Shitty engineering?Griswold - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - link
Well, I dont know for sure. But its definitely not moronic comments from dumbasses such as you.Assimilator1 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Yeah it looks like they've messed up the clock speeds for the lower Phenoms too, lol.Aries1470 - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
Hi,Just found the following strange:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 $205
AMD Phenom X4 9750 $215
The slower one is more expensive, while in the article it has the prices reversed?
"The new Phenom X4 9950 will occupy the $235 space, which will push the 9850 down to $215. The Phenom 9750 will go away temporarily to make room for the new chips at the high end, leaving the 9650 at $195 and the 9550 at $175."
I wonder which one is correct ;-) Hmm... I think a proof reader and an eye for detail is needed :-)
Ok, now for me to read the rest of the article.
Btw, any update on the new VIA Nano CPU - Codename Isaiah? Will there be a review? It is as fast as a 9150e or faster at the same clock speed? It has much less power usage. Now if someone over here could do a review or get more info that would be great, since it is like there is no other x86 competitor out there...
That's all from me.
Gary Key - Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - link
The 9750 pricing will not be changed by AMD officially and thankfully that model is being phased out in the retail sector and replaced by the 9850BE.I have a picture of the VIA Nano PR flag from Computex and a handout explaining how it should perform. That is about as far as VIA is willing to go at this point with information. I did hear from some OEMS that VIA was not even close to getting the CPU out this summer as originally thought, much less advanced reviews. However, we do push them on an almost daily basis for it.