AMD pleads for new energy metric

AMD is pushing a new Average CPU Power metric for measuring chip performance

AMD has introduced a new energy metric which it claims will more closely resemble power consumption in real-world deployments.

The Average CPU Power (ACP) metric is based on power consumption for four standard workloads used for industry benchmarks such as TPC-C and SPEC CPU 2006.

Chipmakers currently disclose power performance based on the thermal design power metric, which represents energy consumption when running at full capacity.

The figure is used by system builders to ensure that a system's power supply and cooling capacity meet peak demands.

ACP is intended for IT staff, allowing them to better understand the impact of a processor on a data centre's cooling and power demands.

The 120W Opteron has an ACP score of 105W for instance, while a 95W processor comes in at 75W.

The consumption metrics include the processor cores, memory controller and hyper-transport links integrated into the AMD processor.

Intel does not have an integrated memory controller. Although this allows the firm to post lower energy consumption data for its chip, the omission draws additional energy to the chipset and affects performance.