It really is pretty wasteful, but not much can be done I suppose.
For example, let's contrast the 13700k to the ancient 7920X. The 13700K benchmarks to 47106, with a TDP of 250, a performance per watt of 188. Compare that to a 7920X, which benchmarks to half that at 23607, with a TDP of 140W, a performance per watt that's less than 170. The 13700K is clearly an improvement if we stopped there!
Except we don't, because the wasted watts matter a lot: the 13700K needs 125W just to power its cores, whereas the 7920X needs 55W. Adjusting our performance per watt to performance per watt per wasted watt, we get 1.57 for the 13700K, but 3 for the 7920X. That old CPU is twice as good at turning energy into work.
The 13700K is unquestionably a higher performing CPU than the 7920X, but it's very hard to, with a straight face, call it an improvement based on energy consumption =)
If you take it to an extreme the flaw is apparent. Let's say "bogomips" is the name of a real world accurate benchmark.
If a CPU at full performance gives 100 bogomips at 2 watts and idles at 1 watt by your metric the score is 50.
On the other hand, if a CPU at full performance gives 200 bogomips at 2 watts and idles at a small fraction under 2 watts, your metric also gives a score of ~50.
It's obvious the 200 bogomips processor is way more efficient than the 100 bogomips processor. Something is missing.
I think both idle watts and TDP are somewhat irrelevant. Maybe it should be bogomips / actual watt draw (different from nominal TDP) at full speed. Assuming you can keep the processor busy. Not being able to keep the processor busy doesn't really reflect on processing efficiency. Except that it is better for the wasted watts to be as low as possible.
A true efficiency, like a true benchmark is elusive, because what is "normal use"? Somewhere between "no work, all waste" and "full use, maximum efficiency".
The 13900KS boosts to 6ghz at 320w.
The 13900K boosts to 5.8ghz at 253w.
That’s a 3.4% increase in clock speed at the cost of a 26.5% increase in power. The marginal power cost for the frequency increase is way out of line.
"but the extra 'S' in the name denotes that this is premium-binned silicon that hits 6 GHz on two cores — 200 MHz faster than the 12900K"These new Intels are desktop CPUs. They also have Performance and Efficiency cores. Ideally, they'd prioritize using E-cores, and only as many as needed to complete tasks within an acceptable period. In effect, though, they're not very smart, and you've got to get into overclocking and undervolting to get them into a state that resembles AMD's TDP-limited ECO Mode that provides 80% of the performance at 50% of the power.
But a lot of the new computing hardware be it AMD, Intel or Nvidia, and be it GPU or CPU, are really pushing factory/stock power profiles farther and farther, and it's not because of inherent architectural/design flaws leading to ineffecincies, but default settings/behaviors encouraging the hardware to pour on the amps to push clocks as far as possible. Look at how happily and aggressively AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU's will boost to hit the 95C before they even attempt to reign themselves in as the most egregious example of this trend. Even if we ignore the above SKU from Intel, it's other 13th Gen Core processors are guilty of similar behavior, though I think they're not quite as aggressive in their boost profile, but still much more so than in prior generations. It shows that instead of maintaining or reducing power and boosting profiles of their products, they're using these generational gains as well as the recent trends in more capable and competent cooling and airflow products going mainstream to really push the power boundaries.
You see a similar thing in combustion only cars. They've made massive improvements in efficiencies, but instead of seeing massive gains in miles per gallon (Generally), we're seeing mpg relatively stagnent or slowly increasing while power output is going up significantly.
For sure this is more fun to watch than another liquid cooling overclocking rig.
Some of the engine work done for drag racing cars did make its way into consumer cars and it's not like grandma and grandpa are going to be ever running these high end CPUs either.
Power efficiency gains in recent generations have been pretty incredible - somewhere around 95% aggregate performance with half the aggregate power consumption of these processors is really crazy.
https://gerrymcgovern.com/data-centers-greenwashing-par-exce...
There is way too much gated on data movement at this point. Sure, CXL or other interconnect schemes may help but there are whole-system challenges for scheduling and dependency management and staging that drive these numbers.
Probably reduces life time
...said people about going to the moon.
...said people about organ transplants.
...said people about the horseless carriage.
...said people about computers.