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i wish PC tech reviewers (and the market at large) gave more of a crap about power efficiency
twice the power consumption for being 10% faster than a competing part is criticised in passing, but ultimately treated like no big deal; a new generation bringing just a 5% performance uplift at 33% lower power is a "missed opportunity"
@deneb a problem with power efficiency can also be in how its measured. GamersNexus' latest video on ryzen 5th gen shows a lot of the testing nuance there. Like one gen somehow using more during loading but then significantly less during gameplay.
Be nice to have some kind of standard to at least give consumers some insight. TDP is a poor metric since it's not consistent and doesnt show how much work can be done for a given wattage, or the idle power consumption, etc
@ChartreuseK @deneb That video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wLXQnZjcjU) certainly doesn't leave me with an impression that Zen 5 is a technological power consumption improvement. The Zen 4 X models TDP's were higher than what makes sense, evident from how little performance is lost by lowering them, but we already have the vanilla versions correcting that mistake.
@NohatCoder @ChartreuseK from what i gather, most of the efficiency improvement in blender comes from AVX-512. i think it's commendable that they're not blasting the power on the X parts this generation, though i do wonder what that will mean for the non-X ones
kinda contrary to the frustration i voiced with my original post, GN did get the memo from the 9700X review comments, they'll include both production and gaming efficiency figures in future cpu reviews. i might have done well to actually watch the efficiency deep dive before hitting Post, oh well
@deneb @ChartreuseK AMD might have done well to set expectations better by not talking so much about games. Make a list of programs that people care about that actually benefit significantly from AVX-512 or more scalar integer operations, then reviewers would probably opt to look at at least some of those.
@deneb@wetdry.world If I was calling the shots, AMD and Intel would both pretty much pause on advancing performance for the next one or two releases, and work on heavily improving efficiency.
Good for environmental reasons, good for portable use cases, and if they don't make efficiency a priority soon they might find ARM knocking them off the top, especially how big the laptop market is relative to the desktop market.
@deneb yes! I have disabled turbo on my i9 10850 and am getting 90% of the performance at literal half of the power draw. No distinguishable detriment.
@deneb 5% uplift at 33% lower power would be so wonderful for climate controlling one's computer space oml...
Less power drawn translates directly into fewer watts of heat getting dumped into the ambient environment.
@deneb@wetdry.world AMD just released the highest power per watt of any x86 CPU, like doing the same workloads it was pulling near Apple-Silicon levels of power while being about as powerful as an M3 MBA
it may not be as efficient when barely sipping power, it draws about 15-50 watts and tends to stick around 30 watts most of the time you're pushing it.
and it's a 12c24t or 10c20t cpu so workloads that need tons of cores will have them.
@ForiamCJ@infosec.exchange- especially true of the last few generations of video cards :/