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High Power For Power Users 13
Power Consumption Tests
9:09 AM - December 28, 2007 by
Patrick Schmid
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: intel, cpu, power, consumption
Syndication:
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: intel, cpu, power, consumption
Syndication:
Table of Contents:
Power Consumption Tests
System Min/Max Power Consumption

Average Power Consumption for SYSmark 2007

Power Requirements during SYSmark 2007 Run

- Previous page SYSmark 2007: Productivity
- Next page Performance vs. Power Consumption...
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=520
For a load that will use all processors, I believe that testing will show better performance per watt for a quad core compared to a dual (or even single) core because there is little or no additional overhead from the motherboard or powersupply or hard drives when adding an additional core.
It may be easier to understand this by comparing running 2 separate PCs with dual core CPUs in them vs. running a single PC with a quad core CPU. The quad core system won't need another motherboard, power supply, fans, drives, etc. so all those items are areas of power savings.
From the published tests above, the 2 extra cores consume 195-132=63 watts at max load and 94-77=17 watts at idle. That is in contrast to adding a 2nd system identical to the E6850 testbox which used 132 watts at max and 77 at idle.
A simplistic scaling using a spreadsheet, and assuming that performance doubles going from dual to quad cores (reasonable for x264 encodes), shows that:
state cores watts perf/watt perf perf/core perf ratio
Idle 2 77 1.46 112.42 56.21 1
Idle 4 94 2.391914894 224.84 56.21 1.638
Avg 2 90 1.46 131.4 65.7 1
Avg 4 112 2.346428571 262.8 65.7 1.607
Max 2 132 1.46 192.72 96.36 1
Max 4 195 1.976615385 385.44 96.36 1.354
In other words, using the system power numbers given, the quad core can be 35% to 64% more efficient than using a dual core, if given an appropriate load. A look at the Sysmark benchmark scores will show you that it did not scale up very much going from dual to quad.