In conclusion let抯 take a look at the power consumption measurements when the CPU is loaded heavily by the S&M utility.
What you see on the chart is a complete failure of the K8 architecture. When the CPU is fully loaded, even the most economical AMD processors consume more power (and hence dissipate more heat) than the Intel Core based CPU with the same performance level.
However, for the dedicated AMD fans I would like to mention a few facts that may change the attitude to the last chart. The thing is that S&M, just like many other tools creating ultimate processor workloads, use special floating-point operations. And it was fine for CPUs on K8 or NetBurst microarchitecture. However, Core 2 Duo processors do not get loaded to the full extent with these utilities. We had to go through a number of different burn-programs to realize that there are a few old ones that do the job much better than S&M, prime95 and others.
For example, when we resorted to BurnK6 tool that we used to use to heat up AMD K6 processors back in the days, we managed to get much higher power consumption numbers for Core 2 Duo E6300: 55W for the CPU and 229W for the platform. In other words, Intel Core based processors hit the maximum power consumption and heat dissipation in absolutely different type of tasks than their competitors and predecessors.
In conclusion we would like to provide the numbers we got when the memory controller was loaded to 100%:
The picture is very similar to what we have just seen in the previous test. Core 2 Duo processor again proves that Intel Core microarchitecture is very economical. And as we see, the same result is obtained for the CPU and the entire platform, which means Athlon 64 X2 processors cannot blame their specific design, namely the integrated memory controller, for this failure.
