AMD Fusion: A8-3500M A-Series Llano APU Review
Power Consumption and Battery Life Analysis
Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the AMD A8-3500M-based Compal notebook. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power this new AMD Fusion test system was consuming with a power meter, versus other test systems we used for benchmarks in the previous pages. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling on the desktop and while under a heavy workload Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured here and not the the CPU or GPU subsystems.
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Since OEM retail products will be configured with a varying assortment of battery technologies, we felt it was important to forgo traditional battery drain power consumption time trials and just focus on system power draw. Remember, our test system is a 14-inch notebook, fully decked out with 802.11n WiFi, an optical drive, a 5400 RPM hard drive and 4GB of DDR3-1333 system memory. This is not a stripped down ultra-light notebook we're looking at here but a relatively full-featured multimedia machine, though granted it employs an LCD that is on the smaller side. Regardless, the power meter told the story loud and clear. AMD's Llano-based A8-3500M offers easily the lowest power consumption of any notebook architecture in its class. Operating at a little over 10 Watts at idle is almost ridiculously low power consumption, as is under 43 Watts under full load for a quad-core CPU with a robust graphics engine. Intel's quad-core Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor eats over twice as much power under full load. Looking back at the numbers, speaking strictly from a performance-per-watt point of view with multimedia and gaming usage models, AMD's Llano is no joke.
