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-...