Less heat also allows for a more compact or mobile design. Smaller builds are gaining popularity.
Gaining popularity in the ever shrinking market of PCs is nothing to brag about. I'd wager it's still not that popular as you make it be. Everyone just buys laptops nowadays and whoever they do buy PCs they get the full sized towers with discrete GPUs for gaming, not small form factors with APUs. That's more of a niche of a niche.
That's why AMD hasn't focused too much on APUs for desktop PCs. It's not a big market. Their biggest sellers are APUs for notebooks and consoles, CPUs for datacenters and desktops, discrete GPUs for ... everything.
However, here we talk about the desktop market, don't we? And not every desktop PC has to be a gaming capable machine. Power-savings will probably be even more relevant for organizations running hundreds of office machines and terminals.
Yes, but desktop PCs not for gaming aren't really selling volumes nowadays, they're a tiny niche being eaten by notebooks and NUCs (also a niche) which Intel has been dominating as they had CPUs with iGPUs (basically APUs without the marketing) since ... forever.
>Power-savings will probably be even more relevant for organizations running hundreds of office machines and terminals.
When was the last time you saw organizations buy PCs for their workforce? In volume I mean, not just one PC for Bob who needed a CAD workstation, because then Bob most likely isn't getting an APU for CAD but some workstation with discrete CPU and some Quadro GPU.
Organizations mostly transitioned their office machines to notebooks a long time ago, even moreso after WFH became more popular so there was less need of PCs tied to a fixed location. PCs not for gaming or heavy compute workstations aren't big sellers anymore.
Yeah, I'm sure governments do buy some amount of desktop PCs because they don't intend for their workforce to work from anywhere else other than a specific office, but you also can't tell me with a straight face that selling PCs to the DMV, FBI and other bureaucrats represents a big lucrative market that was waiting for the APU revolution.
PCs are a low selling niche now. APUs won't move the needle on that, that's why AMD ignored it for so long. End of story.
Scroll up, enlighten yourself.
Cause moving goal posts are lame and exhausting. End of story.
A thing to consider is, for the consumer market, machines have gotten good enough that most don't need a new machine for 5+ years, in terms of performance. Especially for casual household tasks.
Many do care about noise though!
Stuck my gaming PC in the basement decades ago and haven’t worried about cooling or noise since.
Or, at least, I did until the m series processors came out and you could get a passively cooled laptop for a decent price.
As for eco-friendliness... it's something I now consider when buying electronics but more from an electricity bill point of view.
Also, most CPUs spend most of their time idling or very low load, not belching hellfire upon the scorched earth. Efficiency at idle/low power is far more significant than efficiency at flame belching if power consumption over time is concerned.
Who wins depends on both the system and how it’s used.
Switching the SATA card to one with a different chip fixed that.
There were other surprising factors which affected power draw.
My takeaway was that as in real life, sleeping can be hard.
[1]: https://mattgadient.com/7-watts-idle-on-intel-12th-13th-gen-...
See https://gamersnexus.net/guides/3525-amd-ryzen-tdp-explained-...
Synthetic tests that stress everything at full bore, are not realistic representations for your average consumer PC application scenario. Even video games don't cause as much power draw as synthetic benchmarks can which are more akin to power viruses.
In real life daily driving, Ryzen might still be more efficient than Intels but with a much smaller margin than such tests might lead you to believe.
Is that idle? Not sure I could get this box at any lower use than this, even though I understand this is different from having all cores pegged at 100%.
Idling without anything running, even an OS, is interesting for metrics, but not something realistic for any user.
I think the 8700G is probably more efficient but it won't be anything like 65 vs 181 watt would leave one to believe.
- PL1/PL2 from Intel can be compared to TDP from AMD
- CPU Mark scores alone are the best indicator of what full utilization looks like vs another test
You'd be accurate. You can't really assume either of these things though. The better comparison to TDP from AMD is probably closer to "base power" of 125W than PL1/PL2 of 181 on the Intel side. Other benchmarks, like encoding using all cores efficiently with matrix extensions, are in the 25%-30% difference. Combine these two facts and it's probably closer to 1.5x efficient (instead of the 2.5x the raw numbers above suggest, 3x the relative improvement), but you'd have to actually measure active power doing the same amount of total work to know for sure. Even ignoring one of the facts the encoding benchmark differences are enough to guarantee it'd actually be less than twice as efficient, not at least twice as efficient.
In a video encoding task, the 8700G used 30% less energy than the 14600K, but it actually used more energy than a 13400.
65 vs 181 watt
now that is impressive!