The Clarkdale Review: Intel's Core i5 661, i3 540 & i3 530
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 4, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption: Great but not as Good as Lynnfield
The biggest efficiency advantage Lynnfield held over Bloomfield was its extremely low idle power consumption. Clarkdale seems to ruin that thanks to its 45nm IMC/GPU on package. Idle power isn't bad, but noticeably worse than Lynnfield. Update: Many have pointed out that this may be a characteristic of our ASUS H57 motherboard, and that idle power is much more reasonable on Intel's H55 board. We're currently in Las Vegas for CES but upon our return we'll look into this further.
Load power is just dreamy though. This is ultimately what makes Clarkdale competitive. The i3s have the performance to compete with AMD's low-end triple and quad-core CPUs, but if they're anything like the i5 661 they have much better power characteristics than the competition.
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marc1000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Indeed, I want an Atom+ION, but it has not yet come to public availability in Brazil. And Intel is killing ION with the new Atoms, so I believe I won't ever see a Atom+ION board here, because the stores will only launch only the "newer" Atom boards (that is, IF they even launch it...)efficientD - Saturday, January 9, 2010 - link
The other problem with and atom setup is the low cost no L3 cache Athalons. With a decent 785G mainboard, you can get much better performance in only a slightly bigger package for about the same HTPC money. That is the direction I would go if I could build an HTPC right now.IntelUser2000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The reason for high idle and in some way, high load power is due to the Asus board. Not only that, but the H57 chipset.The Intel H55 mobo will lower power consumption enough to get it below the i5 750 and i7 860.
Kaleid - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Would these be chips on would dare to overclock considering the foxconn socket problems that has been reported here @ anandtech?Zool - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Its quite confusing now, with 9 desktop and 11 mobile i-xxx cores now. Not a single digit shows core numbers or the gpu on the new 32nm cpus.Actualy its a total mess now for a average user.
marc1000 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I second your opinion!!! Perhaps Intel hired some marketing folks from Nvidia!!! =DHarry Lloyd - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
So which chip is responsible for HDMI Audio - the CPU, or the H5x chipset?Can we get HDMI audio support with a Lynnfield CPU?
And one other thing - I assume we can use HDMI audio without haeving to use the integrated GPU (for display) when we have a PCI-E card?
DigitalFreak - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The GPU on the processor.Alberto - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The main problem is the Motherboard, likely an early sample not much optimized. Both Xbit Lab and The Tech Report have found a lower idle system power consumption in the new Intel plataform versus the Lynnfield solution. Maybe This article needs of a fast update :-)Alberto - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
The italian site www.hwupgrade.it have discovered even better results. Over an Intel DH55TC motherboard this new cpu is IMPRESSIVE at idle.Intel seems right again.