Power Consumption and Final Words

At 2.0GHz, Yonah is basically equal to, if not slightly slower than an Athlon 64 X2 running at the same clock speed in virtually all of the tests we ran. The important distinction here is that Intel is able to achieve that level of performance, without an on-die memory controller. But there is also one more thing to note, Yonah can offer that level of performance with significantly lower power consumption:

Total System Power Consumption - Idle

Total System Power Consumption - Load

While the Yonah and Athlon 64 X2 systems consumed relatively similar power at idle, Yonah hardly eats up any more power under full load. In fact, a 2.0GHz Yonah under 100% load consumes less power than an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at idle. Obviously Intel has the advantage of being on a much lower power 65nm process, but it won't be until the second half of next year before we see any Athlon 64 X2s at 65nm, so it is an advantage that Intel will have for quite some time.

Although we didn't consider it as such here today , Yonah will be quite impressive on notebooks. The thought of having such a cool running dual core processor in a notebook is honestly amazing, and the performance difference (especially for multitaskers) over what we have today will be significant. The other thing to keep in mind is that when you go from a single core to a dual core Pentium M notebook, you won't be giving up anything at all. On the desktop side, you normally give up clock speed for dual core support, but Yonah will be running at very similar frequencies to what Dothan is running at today. In other words, you won't be giving up single threaded performance in favor of multi-threaded performance - you'll get the whole package.

As a desktop contender, Yonah is a bit of a mixed bag. While its performance in content creation applications has definitely improved over the single core Dothan, it still falls behind the Athlon 64 X2 in a handful of areas. Intel still needs to improve their video encoding and gaming performance, but it looks like we may have to wait for Conroe and Merom for that.

Multitasking Performance
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  • Furen - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    It's not supposed to compete against the 3800+ (But it would have been nice if it could match X2s clock-for-clock, at least, since X2s will hit 2.6GHz soon enough) and it does very considering its power consumption.

    I must say that it looks like 90nm dual-core Turions will be a very good match for these though (which I still dont think they'll hit 35W max power draw), since Yonah on a mobile chipset only uses 25% less power than a "high-voltage" X2 on a desktop chipset.
  • fitten - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    18% less power at idle and 33% less power under load supposedly with the same video card, HDD, and all of that (they didn't actually reiterate the test system configurations, just said they were the same and were the same as configured in a different article).

    Remember... the board tested with Yonah was a desktop version board, not a laptop configuration AND both the Yonah and the board it was on were pre-production test boards. It used the 945G chipset but that doesn't mean that the board was designed in any way like a laptop board. Of course, all of the numbers (performance and power) are subject to change (can be up or down) when Yonah and boards are in production.

    I wish the Yonah would have been faster, too. It does well in some areas (nearly equaling the X2 4200 which is 200MHz faster clocked) but others it seems to fall down. It looks like the FPUs weren't beefed up enough and it still isn't up to par main memory wise as the Athlon64s.
  • Carfax - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    Please post some overclocked scores!
  • bigtoe36 - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    Anand

    Please lower the multiplier, run 200fsb with the ddr2 in 1:1 mode and give us a true apples to apples comparison against X2.

    EIST should work with clockgen in windows if the bios is poor on your board.

    Thanks

  • Beenthere - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    As other PC industry folks have already stated, Yonah, aka YAWNER, is too little, too late and not worth even bothering with. When Conroe and friends arrive, AMD will have already released faster, cheaper X2 CPUs so Intel is still 2 years behind and loosing ground. Why would anyone buy an obsolete, under-performing CPU that requires a new Mobo? Makes no sense.
  • Calin - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    No, they are fine. They are as fast as the X2 3800+ processors in almost everything (except heavy non-SSE floating point), and they consume less. Everything depends on the price Intel will ask for them.
    And I would certainly prefer that Yonah over a Pentium D 830. Why there was no power comparison to the D 830 line too?
  • DrZoidberg - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    Yonah looks ok for notebooks. I mean its slower than AMD X2 but as a mobile processor, its real competitors are AMD Turion and Sempron and Pentium Centrino not X2.

    I do hope Intel wont price gorge dual core notebook processors, hopefully they only be slightly more expensive than Dothan.

  • Viditor - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    quote:

    its real competitors are AMD Turion and Sempron and Pentium Centrino not X2

    Actually, it's real competitor is the dual core Turion...I suspect we shall see AMD extend their lead into the mobile sector this next year.

    I must say that I had one dissapointment with this preview...
    While Anand finished with power numbers, he didn't tell us how or what they measured. For example, was it the whole system or just the CPU? Did it include the Northbridge numbers for Yonah (since these are alreeady included in the X2)? How does this compare to the numbers from the Turion?
  • tayhimself - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    quote:

    Actually, it's real competitor is the dual core Turion...I suspect we shall see AMD extend their lead into the mobile sector this next year.

    Well you suspect wrong, which I suspect, in your case, is quite often. First, there are no dual core Turions on the horizon. Second, AMD is not having much success in that sector because intel's platform strategy is useful for laptop builders. Third, Turion power consumption isnt quite on the same level as Dothan. They will need to move to 65nm before building Turion laptops.
  • Viditor - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - link

    quote:

    Well you suspect wrong, which I suspect, in your case, is quite often. First, there are no dual core Turions on the horizon


    Sigh...have you ever heard of Google before? It's a wonderful little search engine that would have shown you inumerable articles on the Dual Core Turion being released in early 2006...

    quote:

    AMD is not having much success in that sector because intel's platform strategy is useful for laptop builders


    Gee...then increasing their marketshare by 75% from Q2 to Q3 was unsuccessful, eh?

    quote:

    Turion power consumption isnt quite on the same level as Dothan. They will need to move to 65nm before building Turion laptops


    If someone could translate this for me, I'd be happy to respond...

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