Power Efficiency and the Athlon X2 4850e CPU
One of the key points that AMD is very proud of with this chipset release is their continued dedication to providing a power efficient solution.
The first 55nm IGP chipset from any of the big three, AMD’s 780G is clearly offering improved performance and higher transistor counts while lowering the idle power consumption of each successive chip. You can clearly see that the move from the 690G at 80nm and 72 million transistors to 205 million transistors is impressive and the fact that AMD could pull it off without much trouble is a testament to the direction the chipset division is headed.
AMD attempts to go green with an example of how their lower cost chipset that also uses less power could affect the globe if universally integrated across all 822 million in existence. By AMD’s numbers a system based on their new Athlon X2 4850e processor and the 780G chipset would save you some money as well as 10 watts of power while sitting at idle.
If we extrapolate those 10 watts out to every PC for every hour in the day for an entire year, we would save about 72 billion KWh of energy each year. To put that in perspective, which we like to do here, the slide above says that much power could run more than 7 million homes or 10 million cars. Now, I’m not one to bang the greeny-hippie-drum very often but the numbers are interesting to see when put in a different context.
