AMD announces lower-power quad-cores
By Tim Conneally, BetaNews
May 13, 2008, 2:54 PM
On its path back into the black, AMD is going green. The company is putting a lot of weight on the new Opteron line in hopes of it revitalizing AMD's server business, and these new quad-cores promise 43% lower energy consumption.
Called the Opteron HE (for High Efficiency), these x86 Quad Core server processors have an integrated memory controller and a 55-watt ACP thermal envelope instead of the standard 95-watt profile.
What makes rational comparison a little difficult is that AMD uses a different metric for measuring power consumption than its competitors -- and even different from itself not long ago, so a fair judgment of the Opteron HE's efficiency is not so cut-and-dry. The 55W ACP refers to "Average CPU Power," or how much energy it takes to run the CPU, and the 95W figure AMD is comparing it to refers to the Thermal Design Point (TDP) metric, which is how much energy it takes to cool the chip.
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