AMD FX: Energy Efficiency Compared To Eight Other CPUs

Features
By , published

We've already seen AMD's Bulldozer architecture come up short in the performance benchmarks. However, the company also claims it made important improvements to power consumption. Can FX-8150 at least score some points in the energy efficiency department?

Power Consumption: Idle/Load

It appears as if the two first systems in the chart could be running on their integrated graphics engines, since power use is so modest. That's not the case, though. All systems are tested using an AMD Radeon HD 6850 card, which makes the Sandy Bridge idle power consumption even more impressive.

It's clear, though: AMD made a bit of progress compared to its six-core Phenom II X6 1100T, as its FX-8150 consumes less power at idle.

Intel's fastest mainstream chips cannot be beat here. Predictably, the 2 billion-transistor FX-8150 processor draws the most energy when all eight cores are busy.

Now, we're curious to see how the fair, but not impressive, benchmark results and the comparatively high power consumption impact efficiency.

Patrick Schmid
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.