Power Consumption and Performance per Watt
Testing power consumption has become
just as important and relevant in recent years as judging performance
of these processors. And unfortunately, testing power consumption has
also become a lot more complex than it used to be. Where as we used to
just simply test and idle and a load configuration from the wall, new
advancements in multiple-core processors, changes in how power planes
are controlled on these CPUs and software complications give us a bit
more to think about in our power testing.
Performance per Watt Measurements
Now I want to evaluate how the different processors tested here relate to each other in terms of performance per watt. To do this I took the load power consumption of each processor and divided it into the benchmark result to create a new metric like Hz/watt (for Euler3D) or FPS/watt for the games.
The 1090T shows a very good balance of power vs. performance, and is an improvement over the previous Deneb based Phenom II X4s. It gets closer to the Nehalem family of parts, but the i7-980X is essentially in a class of its own with it being produced on 32 nm. We also see better overall efficiency when Turbo Core is disabled, and all cores are running at a full 3.2 GHz no matter the load.
In applications which can utilize up to six threads, then the gains in overall efficiency for the 1090T are huge compared to the older X4 models. In applications like Cinebench we are seeing a 50% increase in the performance/watt ratio.
the performance/watt for the
the performance/watt for the Thuban is increased 13.25% by disabling the turbo-core feature. (methodology: I took the mean of the Turbo off/Turbo on values)