by Rob Williams on March 10, 2010 in Processors
It’s official. We’re now entering the six-core realm, thanks to Intel’s Gulftown. The first model, Core i7-980X, is more than capable of delivering the sick scores that our title suggests, and along with it, we can begin to see some major benefits of the 32nm process. To sweeten the deal further, Intel even includes an effective new CPU cooler.
It goes without saying that power efficiency is at the forefront of many consumers’ minds today, and for good reason. Whether you are trying to save money or the environment – or both – it’s good to know just how much effort certain vendors are putting into their products to help them excel in this area. Both AMD and Intel have worked hard to develop efficient chips, and that’s evident with each new launch. The CPUs are getting faster, and use less power, and hopefully things will stay that way.
To help see what kind of wattage a given processor draws on average, we use a Kill-A-Watt that’s plugged into a power bar that’s in turn plugged into one of the wall sockets, with the test system plugged directly into that. The monitor and other components are plugged into the other socket and is not connected to the Kill-A-Watt. For our system specifications, please refer to our methodology page.
To test, the computer is first boot up and left to sit at idle for five minutes, at which point the current wattage is recorded if stable. To test for full CPU load, LinX is run with 2560MB memory usage for a total of five minutes. During that run, the highest point the wattage reaches on the meter is captured and becomes our “Max Load”.
On the first page of this article, I mentioned that the i7-980X had better power consumption than the i7-975, and here’s proof of that. Unlike most tests up to this point, where all of the Bloomfield processors were tested in a different motherboard, to be more fair here, I popped our i7-975 into the same board we used for Gulftown testing, so the two figures can reliably be compared.
The drop to 32nm has made an obvious improvement here, because both of those CPU’s are based on similar architectures, yet the six-core shaved 45W off at load, and about evens out at idle. When a six-core processor drains less power than a quad-core… that’s what I call impressive.