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AMD's Phenom Processor - Beyond Erratum 298
(Author: Michael Schuette, January 1, 2008)

Power Consumption

One of AMD's strongholds in the recent past has been the power efficiency of the Athlon 64 processors compared to Intel's offerings. Along these lines, we put the Phenom 9600 and 9900 to the test, in both AOD Green and Red (shown as Turbo in the graphs) modes.

Windows Idle Power

Both the 9600 and 9900 show a significant increase in power consumption when AOD Red mode is enabled. One thing to mention here is that the 9600 idles at 1150 MHz (5.75x CPU multiplier) whereas the 9900 sits slightly higher at 1300 MHz.

Maximum Power Consumption

In the case of the Phenom 9600, the differential between AOD Red and Green modes goes away under full load but it does persist in the case of the 9900. What is interesting is that the power delta between the 9600 and the 9900 does not scale with the frequency difference between a 2.3 GHz and 2.6 GHz CPU. When we overclocked the PHenom 9600 to 2.6 GHz, we measured 82 W under full load which is still worlds apart from the 115 W on the Phenom 9900 under the same conditions. We then increased the core voltage for the 9600 from 1.25V to 1.3 V (the nominal voltage of the 9900) and measured 90.4W, still orders of magnitude below the 9900 at the same speed and voltage. We will have a full discusison of the power profiles towards the end of this article.

(AMD Phenom 9600 2.3GHz (HD9600WCGDBO))

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