[imrehg]

Looking at the two specs, interesting to see how Frontier (the first, running AMD CPUs) has much better power efficiency than Aurora (the second, running Intel), 18.89 kW/PFLOPS vs 38.24 kW/PFLOPS respectively... Good advertisement for AMD? :)

[nolok]

These days this is true from top to bottom, desktop, servers, ... Even in gaming, the 7800X3D is cheaper than the 14700K, it is also more performant and yet uses roughly 20% less power at idle and the gap only grows at full charge.

AMD's current architecture is very power responsible, and Intel has more or less used watt overfeeding to catch back in performance.

[qzw]

Is there any good estimate of how much of AMD’s power efficiency advantage can be attributed to TSMC’s process vs Intel’s? I know in GPUs AMD doesn’t enjoy the same advantage vs nVidia since they’re both manufactured by TSMC, and with nVidia actually being on a smaller node, iirc.

[ndriscoll]

I was under the impression that AMD desktops/home servers generally don't go below 15-20 W, while Intel can get down to 4-6 W idle for the full system. Has that changed? AMD seems to generally be the better perf/$, but I thought power usage at idle was their big drawback for desktops/low-usage servers.

IIRC the numbers I've read are that (at least desktop) Intel CPUs should be using something like 0.2 W package power at idle if the OS is correctly configured, regardless of whether it's a performance (K) or "efficiency" (T) model. Most power usage is the rest of the system.

[pyrale]

Also the delta between theoretical performance and benchmarked performance is much smaller for Frontier (AMD) than for Aurora (Intel).

That being said, note that the software is also different on the two computers.

[nolok]

Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same thing : more watt usage, more heat, more throttling.