How often do you run your CPU at 100% load across all cores? For me, idle power draw dominates my overall power consumption. The difference between a 100W peak CPU and a 300W peak CPU basically doesn’t matter across the course of my day, because even compiling large codebases doesn’t last very long.

I say this because I bought into the AMD efficiency hype a few years ago, ditching my Intel workstation for an AMD workstation. Yet according to my home energy monitor, my office circuit consumption actually went up, not down.

Further investigation revealed that my AMD desktop had significantly higher idle power than the old Intel one. Given that most of my day is spent typing, not pegging the CPU at full load, this nets out to higher overall power consumption.

So I’m back to not caring about peak power consumption. If the Intel CPU wants to pull 300W for the 60 seconds that my compile takes, go for it. What I’ll really be looking at is the idle power usage.