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
Media Encoding Performance & Power Consumption
In the interest of time we skipped our general application suites (SYSMark/Winstone) and dove directly into the individual application benchmarks to give us a more direct idea of how AMD's new 65nm chips will fare. We start off with our Windows Media Encoder test:
At the same price point, Intel is still faster with the E6600 as we've seen in the past, but what we're here mainly to do is to compare power usage, so let's see how Brisbane stacks up.
Power consumption is down from 90nm, as the 65nm system used about 15 fewer watts than its predecessor. The move to 65nm actually brings AMD in line with the power consumption of Intel's Core 2 Duo E6600, but it is still not enough to best the EE and EE SFF chips, the latter of which is rated at a cool 35W TDP.
Performance per watt is a different story; although AMD can compete with Intel in terms of power usage, it will take a new architecture to close the performance gap and thus performance per watt suffers in comparison to Core 2 Duo. The good news is that if we just look at the AMD CPUs in the performance per watt chart, it looks like the new 65nm processor offers better performance per watt than anything else in AMD's lineup - even the EE/EE SFF CPUs.
Moving on to our DivX test we see more of the same: the performance lead clearly goes to Intel's Core 2 Duo E6600:
Power usage is actually slightly lower on the 65nm AMD system than on the Core 2 Duo platform, and a bit lower than the 90nm X2 5000+ setup. The difference between 90nm and 65nm isn't huge here, a matter of just under 10W, but hopefully it's merely a sign of an early 65nm process compared to a more mature 90nm process.
The performance per watt crown still belongs to Intel, but if you look at AMD alone, Brisbane offers better efficiency than anything else in AMD's lineup.
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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.