Low-Power and Energy Efficient Processors

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, August 21, 2006, 11:45 AM EDT

Michael Schuette from Lost Circuits has an article on-line detailing the power and performance characteristics of three energy efficient processors, the Core 2 Duo E6300 and the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and 4600+. As usual, Lost Circuits does a great job with the technical analysis. For another take on AMD's Energy Efficient processors, take a look at what we had to say right here.

"With the release of the Core2 Duo line of CPU, Intel has made a complete turn-around in their line-up, pushing the new party line of instructions per Watt. At first glance, primarily the lower speed grades are target for energy-efficiency claims for the simple reason that power consumption increases with frequency in a linear fashion. At close-up, the situation is quite a bit different since Intel's Enhanced Speedstep Technology throttles the frequency of the higher grades back to the same base frequency of 100 MHz while simultaneously lowering the supply voltage, thereby mitigating any potential savings of the lower speedgrades under idle conditions."

Tags: Processors, processor, CES, EFF, Energy, Power, Low-power, process, pro, IE, SSO, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com