Topic: AMD Processors Are More Energy Efficient Than Intel's

[Amker]

There is a war going on. A war between AMD and Intel that started just as soon as the first AMD designed and produced x86 compatible processor came on the market. For a long time, Intel was the undisputed leader in the processor market and the driving force of innovation in the entire computer hardware industry. Then with the first Athlon series processors from AMD the situation changed dramatically and Intel was finally forced to take a deep breath and admit that the mighty company was caught unprepared by an ant-sized opponent.

Nowadays, the war between AMD and Intel is raging on more than one front. On one hand, there is the battle for supremacy on the performance field, where Intel still leads, at least until the next generation of AMD 
processors will  hit the market. This battle was a losing one from the start for AMD as it was forced to compete
with single and dual cored processors against Intel's quad core family and the performance difference was sensible. On the other hand, in the battle to attract customers by offering them a good price for every processor bought, both sides are kind of equally sized. However the price cuts hurt AMD much more than Intel. The final front where AMD and Intel are meeting is the energy consumption one as both private consumers and corporate ones are now interested in a greener technology, one that can deliver the promised amount of computing power without needing too much energy. And on this battlefield AMD is emerging as a victor, as its processors are much greener and more environment friendly.

Tests performed by the independent computer testing firm Neal Nelson and Associates proved that the Opteron processors designed for server platforms by AMD are more energy efficient than Intel's Xeon line: "the AMD based server used 7.3 to 15.2 percent less power at five different user load levels and 44.1 percent less power while the systems were idle and waiting for work." The study concluded and was cited by the news Web based site InfoWorld, that the energy efficiency in Opteron processors translates in economies between $20.29 and $36.04 per server, per year, depending on the workload. At idle speeds, it amounts to a $99.76 per-server, per year saving, the study also said. "AMD must have put a lot of energy into optimizing the power usage for their products and it appears that AMD's customers will now realize significant energy savings," said Neal Nelson, president of the testing group, in a written statement.

In order to accurately measure the energy consumption on both hardware platforms, Neal Nelson and Associates took a new approach to this test, employing a client-server benchmark where Web transactions were processed against a server running Novell SUSE Linux, Apache2 and MySQL. The tests were run on similarly configured 3GHz Intel (Woodcrest) Xeon and AMD Opteron servers. AMD was very pleased to hear about this report and while no one from the company had a chance to review the report in any detail they issued a statement: "While we did not review the methodology for these tests, we are not surprised by the results as they reiterate what we hear from customers and see in our own labs," said John Fruehe, manager of worldwide market development for server/workstation products at AMD, in a written statement. "We appreciate Neal's efforts to shed additional light on energy-efficient server computing, as it further validates what we've known is an important issue for our customers for some time. AMD is committed to delivering energy-efficient solutions to our customers, as you'll see when we roll-out our native Quad-Core processor, codenamed 'Barcelona,' (with the same power and thermals as our dual-core processors) later this summer and in future products for years to come.
cw