Sunday, February 19, 2006

The myth of Centrino power efficiency

This is a real measurement of power consumption of Turion 64 and INTEL Centrino 32. Under load, the Turion 64 MT-40 2.2GHZ consumes 26.4 watt, while the Pentium 32 M 2.13 GHZ consumes 23.3 watt. However, keep in mind the Pentium 32 M needs a separate memory controller which also consumes power.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sharikou, how about the AMD64 instruction set, which the current Pentium M doesn't have, doesn't this mean more circuits, which mean more power consumption?

8:38 AM, February 20, 2006  
Blogger Sharikou, Ph. D. said...

In June 2005, Mooly Eden, an INTEL VP claimed that enterprise demand for 64 bit is low. INTEL "made a conscious decision" to not add 64 bit to Yonah to achieve reasonable battery life. Eden claimed that "It may take many years for enterprises to demand it (64 bit)".

10:51 AM, February 20, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When running full out, both Turion and Centrino consume similar amounts of power, but under a light load (the normal state of affairs for most systems), Centrino's average power consumption is far lower than Turion's. This results in better battery life with the Intel systems. All those $millions Mooly spent on Banias, Dothan, and Yonah processors do provide some technology benefits.

11:02 AM, February 21, 2006  

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