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.