tony sayer wrote:
In article , Daniel James
scribeth thus
In article , Theo Markettos
wrote:
When I looked at the market about 6 months ago, the sweet spot on
power/performance was the Intel i3 (530 at that time). The then
current AMD chips were all on a 45nm process which took more power,
while the i-series are on 32nm.
There are (and were) "Energy Efficient" versions of, for example, the
quad-core Athlon II that have a TDP of only 45W despite being 45nm
technology. The i3 chips are 73W (Clarkdale) or 65W (Sandy Bridge, which
wouldn't have been available at the time?) despite being only 32nm.

Of course, TDP is only a rough indication of the actual power drawn by
any particular chip, but it gives an idea of the upper limit.

It's true that the i3 CPUs have more L2 cache than the Athlon IIs, and
that their clock speeds are higher than the EE version of the Athlon IIs
.. but the Athlons are cheaper and are true quad-core rather than dual
core with hyperthreading. I think my money's still on the AMD parts
where power consumption is important.

Cheers,
Daniel.





My machine is now some 5 years old is a 1.7 Ghz but does all I need fro
it including some complex maths and radio coverage prediction stuff. The
only thing that might push me to a new machine is newer ones seem to be
very quiet nowadays...



yes. I don't expect to upgrade any time soon either.

But get that lot backed up now. 5 years is about MTBF on most disk drives.