AMD's 65nm Brisbane Core Previewed: The most energy efficient AMD CPU to date
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 14, 2006 6:08 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test
Performance-wise, the new Brisbane chips shouldn't be any different than their 90nm counterparts, but to make sure we benchmarked the new chip against our first 90nm X2 5000+. From a power consumption standpoint, we wanted to compare the new 65W 65nm chip to AMD's Energy Efficient and Energy Efficient Small Form Factor 90nm chips to see how the new process competes with the most efficient of AMD's CPUs that use the older, but more mature process. Unfortunately, we only have a 5000+ 65nm chip, so we can't say for certain what advantages Brisbane will hold at equivalent clocks to the EE/SFF parts.
For each benchmark we measured performance as well as average power consumption during the course of the benchmark, finally reporting performance per watt as one divided by the other.
| CPU: | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz/4MB) AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6GHz/512KBx2) AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ "Brisbane" AMD Athlon 64 X2 EE 4600+ (2.4GHz/512KBx2) AMD Athlon 64 X2 EE SFF 3800+ (2.0GHz/512KBx2) |
| Motherboard: | eVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe |
| Chipset: | nForce 680i nForce 590 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | NVIDIA 9.53 NVIDIA 9.35 |
| Hard Disk: | Seagate 7200.9 300GB SATA |
| Memory: | Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2) |
| Video Card: | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 97.44 |
| Resolution: | 1600 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
Before we get to the power consumption tests let's have a quick look at idle power consumption of these systems:
Note that Cool 'n Quiet and EIST were enabled for all tests, but running at 1GHz the AMD CPUs at idle are able to draw much less power than the Intel system (which runs at an idle clock speed of 1.6GHz). Part of the increased power consumption for the E6600 may also be due to the 680i chipset vs. the 590 SLI used on the AMD systems, but we would need to compare both chipsets on a common CPU platform to be sure of that.
Regardless of the reasons, at idle, our Intel test platform consumes much more power than any of the AMD platforms. At the same time, the new 65nm Brisbane CPU doesn't really draw significantly less power than the 90nm cores at idle. Under load though, we've got a completely different story...
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
63 Comments
View All Comments
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Part 2 is coming Monday with Brisbane 4800+ results :)Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link
Just an update guys - Part 2 is ready to go, just waiting for a few clarifications from AMD on performance, memory dividers and die size of Brisbane.Take care,
Anand
OcHungry - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Mr. Anand, is it possible that you use Asus's Crosshair motherboard if attempting for the max overclocking of these 65nm's? It's only fair when you use top Intel board but leave out top AM2 board. I have an understanding that Asus's Crosshair board is ~ 15%-17% better performer than other boards. Also I've heard that the DFI board is a great Overclocker and you have used it on the s939 reviews. I would appreciate it if you use either board, but preferably the Asus Crosshair.Thanks.clairvoyant129 - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link
A different motherboard won't save this sorry ass piece of junk.Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Unfortunately I don't have either of those boards here for testing, but I'm sure I can persuade either Gary or Wes to do a follow-up with a more serious look at 65nm overclocking once I'm done with the power analysis on these chips. :)Take care,
Anand
xenon74 - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Jarred, why is then HT Link @ 1125Mhz on Anand's "unfortunate" OC attempt?ADDAvenger - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Anyone else wondering what this means for the new generation of Turion X2s?I know Santa Rosa is coming out either Q1 or Q2 this year; it's supposed to support an 800 or 400mhz FSB, depending on system load, which should drop power consumption a bit. But, as I understand it, the real battery suckers are CPU, display, and HDD. (Yeah throw in GPU too if you have discrete graphics.) But where does that leave the chipset, will Santa Rosa really do much for battery life?
If not, AMD could make serious inroads into the laptop segment. 65W is hot for a laptop, but if they can drop their desktop TDPs by about a 1/3 or 1/4, why can't they do the same for their laptop chips?
mino - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
They can. And they will...FYI even 90nm Turions consume LESS power than Merom. (Merom is more power hungry than Yonah).
Also RS690M is about to rule the integrated market (along with RS700M for C2D). In other word AMD is gonna rule the chipset market for both platforms while beeing pretty competitive in CPU's, especially for bussiness use.
(for bussiness the features and battery life is what counts, not the absolute performance)
Johnmcl7 - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Not according to Anandtech:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
Shows power consumption to be as near as identical between the two processors.
Not sure if you are comparing Turion or Turion X2 to Merome but aside from mismatched comparisons (such as comparing the power consumption of a Turion system with onboard graphics and Merom with dedicated graphics) I've not seen like for like tests showing Turions to be more power efficient:
"Does that make the Core 2 Duo worse at power saving than Turion X2? Without equivalent setups (i.e. both using IGP or both using discrete GPUs), we can't say for certain. We can say that an ASUS W5F with a T2300 chip (1.67GHz 2MB cache) that we had at one point bottomed out at 19W in idle mode, so Core Duo and Turion X2 appear close in low power states, with Turion X2 perhaps holding a slight 1-2W advantage. Our testing of Core Duo vs. Core 2 Duo showed the CPUs to be nearly equal in power draw, so it appears AMD is equal or slightly better than Intel at minimum power draw. At maximum power draw by the CPU, Turion X2 is definitely using more power than Core 2 Duo, as even with higher performance/power components the ASUS A8JS still uses less power than the MSI TL-60 at 100% CPU load."
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2856&p...">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2856&p...
John
rqle - Friday, December 15, 2006 - link
Darn, was so hoping AMD 65nm would give an easy 3.3ghz+ like the intel chips =(. This chip may not reflect overall OC, but it damn hovering around my AMD range of 2.6-2.8 again. A 2.66-2.7 OC intel is > then 2.9ghz AMD. Ill just waited again.