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AMD still insisting on its ACP rating
Author: Richard SwinburnePublished: 6th February 2009
ACP, TDP - does anyone state anything meaningful any more?
AMD's, Nigel Dessau, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, tweeted yesterday to another hack: "No two people measure TDP the same way. How valid is the compare?"
According to his official blog, Dessau tries to state AMD's position as one of being green and of energy efficiency. He claims AMD is going down this route in order to better educate IT managers into making informed decisions about power budgets and all the rest of it.
AMD is measuring ACP with "typical data centre workloads" - which means it's designed for Opteron CPUs predominantly. We can accept this probably a good thing for servers and high power data centres where electricity and cooling bills can be rather large. But it's clear that anyone taking the figures still needs to grab a fist full of salt: are AMD's methods of measurement applicable to your environment and workloads? And worse yet - trying to work out whether you want Intel, AMD, IBM or whatever else and having only a marketing number, opposed to a scientific one, doesn't really help anybody.
AMD also claims it "provide[s] TDPs for system designers who need to know what worst-case thermal limits to use when designing a system, which is of course a practical application of that metric."
Now, are we talking worst case thermal loads for short bursts or hours at a time? For example, for years now Intel has used a "typical" TDP rather than TDP-Max because, again, it looks better on paper.
We were curious how far its ACP rating was being pushed so we asked AMD, who confirmed that was limited to server products only - desktop and notebook parts are not included. The problem this industry has is there's no official, quantifiable rating system so if AMD chooses to try and suggest something new for its own product, even if there is some technical reasoning behind it to aid certain customers, there will be an inevitable claim that it's a marketing push - especially if the numbers are conveniently lower.
What Nigel Dessau says is right - there's direct no way to compare the two without knowing that they are measured identically, however is AMD effectively forced to use the TDP nomenclature just because "that's how it's always been" or is one/are both companies simply playing hard and fast with those three letters in whatever way it suits them? Does an arbitrary TDP value even matter as long as the CPUs continually strive for performance efficiency, the motherboards support everything thrown at them and they keep making CPU coolers big enough? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Comments (14)
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Still, I'd like to see some kind of standardisation brought to the market - preferably something like TDPmax & average TDP, where the average is always taken at a certain processor load, say 30% or 50% - in much the same way that mpg figures that car manufacturers use are measured at certain speeds.
PPD - Peak Power Draw - the maximum amount of power the CPU could possibly draw.
PTO - Peak Thermal Output - the maximum amount of heat the CPU could ever need dissipating.
Those are the same =P
Anyhow, I'm not too concerned about it. There are enough review sites out there that I can find a site using the CPU I want to buy with cooling similar to what I am going to use to get an idea of what my temps should be like.
That's because you couldn't compare the clock speeds of those AMD CPUs to Intel CPUs. That was a smart move by AMD to ensure people had a decent comparison between brands. But this is ridiculous.
If they had better numbers, they'd be rubbing them in Intel's face.
I do like where AMD is going tho, chipset is produced by them, CPU and GPU aswell.
So a well built driver and app could throttle a computer down for power saving really effectively.
Tell that to anyone who has tried to overclock a modern amd cpu and killed a motherboard (looking at you bindi haha) because the board is only rated to the power draw stated by amd rather than its true tdp especially when overclocked, it frys motherboards something fierce when your cpu is rated at a reported say 125w but it drawing more and your board that is rated for 140w tops can't handle the true draw especially when you get into black edition overclocking
I would say, why would you overclock it when you know the motherboard can't bear the TDP? Its like shooting on your own foot LOL :p That's why a regular motherboard don't overclock well if compared to overclocker's motherboards. Because when you're overclocking, you need a better components to bear the higher power draw and the higher thermal dissipation. A TDP measured with the processor running in standard clock-speed, when you overclock it, the TDP will rise exponentially (IIRC) so you need a motherboard specialized for overclockers.
That is exactly what AMDs TDP refers to. The maximum power draw @ maximum voltated (the cpu is designed for and run at). Intel on the other hand bases the it's TDP on testing the cpu under real world scenarios and get an average from that.
Basically AMD basically gives us the theoretical upper limit while intel gives us the upper limit for "regular-real world use".
ACP is good to know for professionals because AVERAGE power consumption helps them calculate the TCO over several years.