very lower power combo - i3-2100T and Zotac H67 ITX

[deruberhanyok]

I just ran across this article at xbit:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... 2100t.html

The power numbers are on page 11, but the short version is: that's a really low power draw! At load it was pulling under 35 watts... at idle it was under 10! And I thought my i3-530 + DH57JG combo was high performance / low power.

Has anyone gotten hold of an i3-2100t yet? What are your power numbers like? This looks like one to beat if you need more power than Atom or Brazos but want to keep the power draw low.

[andymcca]

Nice.

Sadly, the article describes the fate of all K10s of late:

Does it mean that AMD Brazos platform has totally fallen from grace? Not at all, because as we have mentioned in the very beginning of this article there are four major criteria for all integrated platforms. Even though it doesn’t boast supernatural energy-efficiency and performance of its computational as well as graphics cores, it stands out due to very low cost. In other words, AMD chose a very unusual strategy – by offering the most competitive prices. And in this case it turns out that AMD Brazos platform including a dual-core 1.6 GHz AMD E-350 processor costs not only half of the Core i3-2100T price, but also considerably less than Mini-ITX ION2 mainboards.

It is the lowest prices of AMD E-350 based solutions that ensure a lot of public interest in them. For a little over $100, AMD offers a platform that can easily playback HD video content and therefore can also be used for HTPC. However, it is important to remember that a Brazos based computer will have very limited application field: many resource-demanding applications will be very slow on a system like that, because the x86 performance of AMD E-350 is about the same as that of Intel Atom D525.

Maybe Llano will be magical? Whenever it reaches the wild.

Edit: PS I am personally an AMD guy, and I still like them for ECC, etc., but they are mostly a budget option for standard computing these days

[ces]

Has anyone gotten hold of an i3-2100t yet? What are your power numbers like? This looks like one to beat if you need more power than Atom or Brazos but want to keep the power draw low

Actually any Sandy Bridge will perform similarly at similar usage levels. The 2600K idles at about 4 watts. Even if the i3-2100t is half that... it doesn't make much difference.

And for usage levels where you are staying under 25% cpu utilization of a 4 core Sandy bridge... there isn't going to be much if any difference in energy usage. It is pretty hard to exceed 25% cpu utilization of a 4 core Sandy bridge... even gaming (provided you have a graphics card).

And most of the time either chip is running it is likely to be idling.

The lesson is unless you have a fairy unique situation, get the cheapest 4 core Sandy Bridge and you get to have your cake and eat it too. It will sip electricity almost as good as an Atom... and it will give you pavement ripping power if you put the pedal to the metal..... and the low end 4 cores are cheap.

[deruberhanyok]

I had a long post typed up but it was eaten.

Andy, I'm with you on that. All the pre-release talk for Brazos had me pretty interested in the platform. When it was available and tests started showing the CPU at Atom levels of performance I was disappointed. I really dig that it has a great IGP attached to it, but I don't like the tradeoff of raw CPU performance for lower power draw.

Llano will hopefully be interesting. I'm an AMD fan myself, but it's been a while now that I've seen any of their stuff as very compelling. Although I think their efforts to increase IGP performance were fantastic (and very appreciated), something about the Phenom line just doesn't appeal to me.

ces, well, I'm more interested in the power draw at load. You're right, it's pretty rare that a system would see that usage (my own system, in fact, never does anything more strenuous than the occasional CD audio rip / compress), but it's the principle of the thing that I like. I think it'd be cool ( ) to go even lower, to be able to say that at full tilt even the 65W power supply of my ISK 300 isn't close to being taxed.

Seeing a processor with that kind of horsepower drawing less power than some of the early Pentium IIs is pretty amazing, and it makes me wonder what low power variants of Ivy Bridge might look like. I'm having visions of quad core, SMT capable, AVX beasts of processors with the power draw of a Pentium MMX.

I really dig the potential of a CPU with high-end capabilities and performance being run without a fan on the heatsink. If they pulled 35W out of 32nm, maybe we'll see 25W (or less?) out of 22nm?

[ces]

Seeing a processor with that kind of horsepower drawing less power than some of the early Pentium IIs is pretty amazing, and it makes me wonder what low power variants of Ivy Bridge might look like. I'm having visions of quad core, SMT capable, AVX beasts of processors with the power draw of a Pentium MMX.

I really dig the potential of a CPU with high-end capabilities and performance being run without a fan on the heatsink. If they pulled 35W out of 32nm, maybe we'll see 25W (or less?) out of 22nm?

Yes. I think this 1155 platform is going to have a long life... like the 775.

I went to the local compusa/tigerdirect store to see if they had an ITX 1155. No. All they had was 775 and AMD... not a single 1155 board yet. The guy at their support counter said give it another 6 months. I guess it keeps their prices low and it works well for most people.

I can see a lot of people using the 1155 platform for a long time. At an idle of 4 watts for the cpu, how low can you go. And even the weakest of the SB appears to have more than enough horse power for the next two or even three iterations of Windows.