Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell Consuming 30% Less Power Than 22nm Haswell 88
MojoKid writes "Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, while on stage, at IDF this week snuck in some additional information about Broadwell, the 14nm follow up to Haswell that was mentioned during Brian Krzanich's opening day keynote. In a quick demo, Kirk showed a couple of systems running the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark side-by-side. One of the systems featured a Haswell-Y processor, the other a Broadwell-Y. The benchmark results weren't revealed, but during the Cinebench run, power was being monitored on both systems and it showed the Broadwell-Y rig consuming roughly 30% less power than Haswell-Y and running fully loaded at under 5 watts. Without knowing clocks and performance levels, we can't draw many conclusion from the power numbers shown, but they do hint at Broadwell-Y's relative health, even at this early stage of the game."
30%? (Score:2, Informative)
Meaningless number unless we know they are comparing at same performance level. You can get another IvyBridge CPU, downclock it, and you'll get 30% less power use.
Re:How much does this help? (Score:4, Informative)
Helps a lot. But there are many factors that affect power usage.
Power supplies used to be awful. I've heard of efficiencies as bad as 55%. Power supplies have their own fans because they burn a lot of power. Around 5 years ago, manufacturers started paying attention to this huge waste of power. Started a website, 80plus.org. Today, efficiencies can be as high as 92%, even 95% at the sweet spot.
GPUs can be real power pigs. I've always gone with the low end graphics not just because it's cheap, but to avoid another fan, and save power. The low end cards and integrated graphics use around 20W, which is not bad. I think a high end card can use over 100W.
A CRT is highly variable, using about 50W if displaying an entirely black image at low resolution, going up to 120W to display an all white image at its highest resolution. An older flatscreen, with, I think, fluorescent backlighting, uses about 30W no matter what is being displayed. A newer flatscreen with LEDs takes about 15W.
Hard drives aren't big power hogs. Motors take lots of power compared to electronics, but it doesn't take much to keep a platter spinning at a constant speed. Could be moving the heads takes most of the power.
These days, a typical budget desktop computer system, excluding the monitor, takes about 80W total. Can climb over 100W easy if the computer is under load. So, yes, a savings of 5W or more is significant enough to be noticed, even on a desktop system.
Re: ARM vs x86 (Score:2, Informative)