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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: economaniack who wrote (243228)	11/3/2007 1:25:12 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"So this is just a really terrible choice of review for evaluating my claim that AMD tuned for low load efficiency." Whether it was their original intention or not, it did happen. At 90nm, both Intel and AMD used 1.2nm gate oxide. At 65nm, AMD increased it to 1.5nm. What makes it even more interesting is that when AMD was originally talking about the process, it had a 1.2nm gate oxide. So, something changed. Maybe they ran into trouble. Or maybe at some point they realized that they were going to be outperformed and decided try to change the game. Either way, they have a process that has low gate leakage. And is going to have trouble clocking as high as their 90nm process unless they can start pulling rabbits with strain.

To: economaniack who wrote (243228)	11/3/2007 9:21:16 PM
From: wbmw	Respond to of 275872

Re: No, it doesn't mean that at all. Comparing two quite different configurations, Anand concluded that the Intel is much more efficient under load but the two systems are comparable in power consumption at idle. They compared two different AMD processors in the same enclosure. One dissipated equal power, and the other dissipated slightly higher power. This is with a larger LCD on the Intel system (15.4" vs. 14.0"), which infers that the CPU itself most likely dissipates less power. The review admits that this is inconclusive data, but I am connecting the dots myself, since I presume that the LCD is the most power hungry part of a mobile system in idle (there are data that supports this presumption as well). Re: My claim was that AMD had intentionally tuned their process to trade off improved idle efficiency at the cost of full load performance, and this confirms that this system shows that relative to the Intel system. So AMD tuned their process to the point where - at best - their mobile processors are equal to a comparable Intel processor in idle power, while still performing much lower on CPU bound benchmarks. Ok, this shows some prowess on AMD's part that they have focused on idle power, but loaded power is uncompetitive, and performance is uncompetitive. And that's on a 65nm to 65nm comparison. With Intel moving to 45nm and getting huge gains in terms of performance/watt, I would project Intel as widening their advantages. Re: The AMD box has an nVidia chipset and gaming oriented graphics, while the Intel box has a highly tuned (for efficiency) Intel platform. The AMD box uses the ATI RS690M/SB600 chipset and Radeon X1250 integrated graphics. I don't debate that the Intel system is tuned for power efficiency, but I would think HP as capable of tuning the Turion system just as much. Re: So this is just a really terrible choice of review for evaluating my claim that AMD tuned for low load efficiency. Your choice, by the way. And even so it makes my point I don't agree. It's not the ideal apples to apples comparison, but if anything, it's weighted negatively against Intel, given that the Intel system comes with a larger LCD and smaller battery. And yet it still comes out even to ahead in the power measurements. This makes my case even more. You would have an argument if there were any negative handicaps on the AMD system, but with Intel negatively impacted, and still coming out ahead, it's easy for me to conclude that Intel has the more power efficient mobile processor.