To: Jim McMannis who wrote (32223 ) 3/19/2001 4:31:59 PM From: Tenchusatsu Read Replies (1) | Respond to Jim, PowerNow offers a lot more flexibility with clock speed adjustments. It also gives AMD marketing a lot more maneuvering room in their benchmark bragging. For example, when measuring average power consumption, a 1 GHz mobile Palomino could actually be running at 300 MHz 99.9% of the time if you set the PowerNow throttling thresholds at really tight settings. Then you can say that 1 GHz Palomino consumes less power than 1 GHz (or 700 MHz) mobile Pentium III, even though PowerNow effectively underclocked the processor to Celeron 300 levels just to achieve that. At least with SpeedStep, you know exactly what speed the processor runs at all the time, allowing for more consistent measurements (relatively speaking, of course, considering the dismal state of benchmarking these days).
