I really need to upgrade my personal media server but both companies' CPUs just use way too much power. It's kind of ridiculous. Yes, they're fast but power hungry as heck. Makes my dual xeons I run now look energy efficient.
They're not though? They both offer incredibly fine control over how much power they consume, and will happily run at way lower power. They seem to accept undervolting pretty well too, which is a little riskier-of-instability/fancier.
There is some new inefficiency on AMD builds now that the Core Chiplet Die (CCD) and IO Die (IOD) are separate units, not monolithic. DDR5 also taked more power. The fancier X670 chipset (really, two chipset dies) also takes power & could very much use some tuning, but it's also doing a beastly amount of IO work, in some cases for good cause (more low power capabilities/better idle would be appreciated though! One of AMD's first in house chipsets in a long time).
We've barely started exploring how well behaved we can make the just launched 65w ryzen parts... but it wouldnt be shocking to me if there's not really any advantage, if they literally end up being nearly the same part, rebadged & preconfigured to lower power. Is there even really going to be any binning to have selected these? You know maybe not!
Out of the box most chips come tuned for speed, but ask them to be a little nixer, turn on eco mode or power the power point, they are stunningingly efficient. Alas idle could use some tuning; staying under 40w idle is harder than it ought to be.
I need the performance, thats the problem every one here seems to have missed. Yes, I know there's lower powered chips. This server has 30 HDDs. I use it for a lot of processing on photos and videos I take.
Modern CPUs scale quite non linearly and the default set-point is where it is for marketing reasons. My i7-7800 can do 1 work for 70 watts, 1.25 works for 150 watts or 0.9 works for 38 watts.
It is sort of incredible that HN can't figure out how to set the power limits on CPUs. It's almost like they deserve the walled garden Apple gives us without any knobs or controls.
The 7700/7900/7950 have a 65 watt TDP, idle much lower, and can be underclocked if you want lower. I certainly wouldn't consider 65 watts as "power hungry as heck".
Did you by chance read an Intel i9 review? Yes, Intel's going crazy on the power front trying to match the AMD performance, which of course lead to AMD pushing it a bit as well. But the new non-X AMD CPUs are quite power efficient for the performance.
If that's still to much the M2 or M2 Pro in a mac mini is rather efficient on power and still performance quite well.
only if you disable boost. 88W PPT for AMD's "65W" CPUs at stock.
not a fan of the "PPT" terminology, it's pretty deliberately designed to mislead people and give AMD a mental "cheat factor" in these comparisons.
And no this is not something that "everyone did", in the 5960X/7700K days Intel's TDP values were expected to cover boost clocks and AVX as well, it's only 8700K/9900K/etc where Intel started to play fast and loose with their TDP figures. Which was after the introduction of Ryzen and the "PPT" terminology... in those days AMD pulled more than Intel's chips and they needed a way to hide it. Then they took the lead on efficiency.
kinda like TSMC naming their chips "7nm" and that resulting in huge mindshare problems for Intel even though 10ESF/Intel 7 (third-gen 10nm) was actually better than N7. Or Samung 8nm not even being as good as first-gen Intel 10nm, lol. So Intel had to rename their nodes too. A few bad actors ruin it for everyone.
88W is the number that matters for your load power measurement comparison - again, unless you disable boost.
The "X" chips are also clocked higher... 7950X would be 170W with boost disabled and runs 220W at stock.
From what year? Maybe 2010? The type that would feel pretty warm when touched, especially on the top edge?
I have a 27" Dell U2719DC from 2 years ago, pretty average monitor, 2560x1440, includes a USB hub, and has a USB-c ports for charging other widgets.
On a bright screen, like full screen tab of HN I get 22 watts. If I have a darker screen like anything full screen in dark/night mode (white text on black background) I get 20 watts. When I touch the screen or top edge it's pretty close to room temperature.
To be fair my work configuration uses two of the 27" monitors.
I'm measuring with a kill-a-watt, which has a decent reputation for accuracy.
Dual Xeon is worst for idle power consumption that is most of the time of personal media server. Just buy old Intel micro PC that is good for idle power consumption.
