gdjacobs wrote:Actually, yes, as you're using instantaneous power measurements to dispute the validity of TDP measurements.
Instantaneous? Where did you get that from?
The power consumption was measured at the wall socket, and therefore can in no way be any kind of 'instantaneous' measurement of the CPU (there's too many components in between), but will be some average over a given interval (which I have to admit, they have not specified).
Not to mention that a 'TDP' is not a measurement, it's a specification, and by its nature, somewhat arbitrary to the CPU manufacturer.
As such, there is no 'validity' to speak of. I merely said there's a large discrepancy. That does not imply that the TDP is not 'valid' under the arbitrary constraints that a given CPU manufacturer has chosen.
I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't directly compare ratings of different CPU manufacturers (or even from CPUs of different series from the same manufacturer), and you shouldn't draw conclusions of power draw based on TDP alone. Instead it's better to look at reviewers who use tools to measure actual power draw of the system.
Wouldn't you agree that's good advice? Sounds like you don't, and you keep focusing on the arbitrary TDP.
gdjacobs wrote:The benchmark I quoted was just to provide some historical context.
It looked more like you yourself don't even know how to read/interpret a power measurement.
You quote the TDP of a CPU, then compare it to system power measurements directly, then draw some wrong conclusions on the data.
gdjacobs wrote:I appreciate your technical expertise, but this is complaining about a non issue.
Wow, seriously?
I am not talking about small details here, or tight margins. I am talking about a ~50% discrepancy between rated TDP and deltas(!) in measured system power draw.
You can argue all you want, trying to drop fancy buzzwords you googled online to fake some understanding (just as you did with parallelizing physics calculations earlier...). But to me it's obvious that:
1) You don't know what you're talking about.
2) Your only agenda is to try and downplay this issue.
I don't want to get into any details of micro-effects on power consumption, such as 'nominal duty cycle', 'throttling' or whatever, since it's all pretty much irrelevant to the scenario at hand:
A number of systems were tested with recent CPUs (therefore we can assume that they should have 'state of the art' power management, and any differences between products can be seen as shortcomings to meet that state-of-the-art), in the exact same scenario, which was an entire benchmark run of Cinebench R15, which is hardly a detailed 'snapshot' of a few micro-seconds at most.
Bottom line is: the difference is huge. I don't want any 'explanations' of why that difference is huge, or whatever excuses you try to come up with.
The quoted figures are clear, as I said before: you should not expect an AMD CPU rated at a TDP of 95W to be in the ballpark of an Intel CPU with the same TDP. Rather, it is in the ballpark of Intel CPUs rated at 140W TDP.
A 45W discrepancy is not a non-issue, period. End of discussion.
Don't use TDP as substitute for power consumption, as I explained above.