Michael Mol wrote: > On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: >> The point made about producing less heat with the smaller nm sounds >> reasonable tho. > Less heat with the smaller nm, but only if all other things remain equal! > > In reality, manufacturers use additional margin within their TDP to > improve the product otherwise. Perhaps they increase the clock speed > somewhat. Perhaps they increase the amount of on-die cache. Perhaps > they reduce the instruction pipeline. > > AMD, for example, has tended to maintain keep something in the market > for a 125W, 95W and 65W TDPs for several years. Each year, the > functionality that used to be in a 125W TDP processor shows up in a > 95W TDP processor, and the latest 125W TDP processor beats the pants > off of last years'. >
I found this to be plain weird when I built my new rig. My old rig was a AMD 2500+ single core system with 2Gbs of ram. It pulled about 400 watts or so for normal desktop use. A little more when compiling and such. My new rig, AMD Phenom II 955 with four cores and 16Gbs of ram. Heck, just a single core is much faster than my old rig. Thing is, the new rig pulls less than half of what the old one pulls, WHILE COMPILING. I can't recall the nm part but I think the CPU I got for my old rig was supposed to be for laptop use. AMD sure is getting more efficient as you point out. I still wonder where we will be in 10 years. Just how fast can they make them? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
