Research firm claims AMD beats Intel on power efficiency

A COMPANY that tested Intel CPUs against AMD CPUs for power efficiency claimed that the chip underdog beat the chip giant in 36 out of 57 tests it conducted.

Neal Nelson & Associates (NNA) said it conducted tests on servers configured with 2GB, 4GB, 6GB and 8GB of memory using various transaction processing load levels.

NNA said that while in certain systems, Xeon servers were between 2.4 and 11.7 per cent more power efficient, in other cases AMD Opteron servers performed better at 9.2 to 23.1 per cent power efficiency.

The tests showed that Intel's power efficiency advantages decrease as memory sizes increased, while the reverse was true for Opteron based machines.

NNA uses its own Server Power Efficiency Benchmark.

An Intel representative commented: "The report doesn't measure our latest Xeons, or quad cores. We have 2GHz quad cores in the market at 50 watts, 12.5 per core! The report ignores performance, in that you'd use less Intel servers to get the same job done, meaning less electricity is needed.

"We stand behind all of our energy efficient claims, period. For those IT managers who don't do their own in-house testing, we recommend that each look at the 100s of independently verified benchmarks and reviews that exist for the most credible assessment."

Full details of NNA tests are here. µ