The truth about power consumption

It is of little value to measure power consumption by only looking at the spec sheets for different components, adding the totals together, because these generally only report the maximum power consumption. This scenario is like the car with a speedometer that tells you the maximum speed is 150MPH – it’s a maximum reading but it doesn’t reflect daily usage.

Unfortunately, AMD’s own customer research indicates that nearly three out of four customers only use processor specification sheets to determine power levels. Based on the architectural differences between AMD and competitive processors, like AMD’s integrated memory controller and AMD’s use of energyefficient DDR-2 memory, the numbers at the platform level can tell a very different story at the wall compared to the specification sheets.