AMD's Phenom X3 8000 Series: Fighting Two Cores with Three?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 23, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption
For our power consumption numbers we only used CPUs that we actually had (rather than underclocking CPUs to simulate others).
Cool 'n' Quiet brings the Athlon X2's clock speed down low enough where, despite being made on a 90nm process, it actually draws less power than the 65nm triple and quad-core Phenom chips. The problem is that even the 6000+ doesn't run as cool as the rest of the Intel lineup here.
At the same clock speed, the power savings of a triple-core Phenom X3 vs. a quad-core X4 are tremendous. Unfortunately, despite much lower power consumption the X3 8750 still consumes more power than a much faster quad-core Core 2 Q6600. To make matters worse, the comparison will quickly shift to the Q9300 as availability increases and we already know how much better Intel's 45nm process is when it comes to power consumption.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
The problem is without support in 100% of the titles it's not something you can really count on. If you go with too slow of a CPU, hoping to rely on GPU acceleration but then try and play a rip that isn't accelerated you're just out of luck.Regardless, I'm just waiting for the day when all platforms feature GPU acceleration :)
Take care,
Anand
ViRGE - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
"Now if you pirate your HD movies then none of this matters, as GPU accelerated H.264 decode doesn't work on much pirated content."Sure it does, the Cyberlink H.264/MPEG-2 decoder is a complete DirectShow-compliant module. Anything H.264 that can be played in a DirectShow application is accelerated by it, both legit and pirated content.
0roo0roo - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link
it doesn't matter either way. pirated h264 content tends to be lower bitrate versions of the full hd rip.even at full bitrate it doesn't matter as processors have come to a point where even budget dual cores can decode h264 quite well.
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
And on the free software side, Media Player Classic Home Cinema (what a mouthful) also has GPU accelerated decode now too (only for the newer video cards though).While not all pirate content are encoded in a manner that can be accelerated, the functionality is available now.