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? :)
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.
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.
7800x3d maxes out around 80 watts (has to be gentle to the vcache), the 14900k can go up to 300w (out of box, though Intel is issuing a new bios to limit that), and they trade blows in gaming.
I would say that's a bit more than process efficiency?
Oh, certainly there are significant architectural advantages, especially for the vcache SKUs in gaming. It would just be interesting to see how much TSMC is still (or maybe further) ahead of Intel. Intel was so used to having the process advantage vs AMD that their architecture could afford to be less efficient. But now that they're the ones behind in both process and arch, they're really hurting, especially on mobile now that AMD is making inroads and Snapdragon X is about to get a serious launch in a week. I'm typing this on a ThinkPad 13s with a Snapdragon 8cx CPU running Windows, and it's a pretty usable device that lasts much longer on a smaller battery than my comparable Intel laptop. It seems to particularly use much less power on standby, although it can't seem to wake up from hibernation reliably.
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.
They both have similar frequency and voltage scaling algorithms at this point. You will probably not see 0.2W idle though, both probably idle around 10W on desktop and 5W on laptop. But Intel is getting much more aggressive with "turbo boost" to try to hide their IPC/process deficit vs. AMD/TSMC, to the point that a 14900k will use 120W+ to match the performance of a 7800x3d at 60W.
As far as I can gather, that's not the case. These guys[0] have been crowdsourcing information about power efficiency for a while now, and the big takeaways right now seem to be that
* Intel is the best for idle (there's several people that have systems that run at less than 5 W for the full system using modified old business minipcs off ebay). Allegedly someone has a 9500T at less than 2 W full system power.
* It doesn't matter which Intel processor you use; all of them for many years will get down to 1 W or less for the CPU at idle. A 14900K will idle just as well as an 8100T, which will be much better than a Ryzen 7950X.
* AMD pretty much never gets below 10 W with any of the Ryzen chiplet CPUs. Only their mobile processors can do it, but they don't sell them retail and they're usually (always?) soldered.
* Every component except the CPU is more important. Your motherboard and PCIe devices need to support power management. You need an efficient PSU (which has nothing to do with the 80-plus rating, which doesn't consider power draw at idle). One bad PCIe device like an SSD or a NIC can draw 10s of watts if it breaks sleep states. Unfortunately, this information seems to be almost entirely undocumented beyond these crowdsourcers.
For a usually idle home-server, Intel seems to be better for power usage, which is unfortunate because AMD tends to have more IO and supports ECC.
