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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

In terms of power consumption, I think that will heavily depend on usage patterns. AMD desktop processors currently have really bad idle power because of the chiplet-based design with an outdated 14nm IO die. So if a machine spends most of its time idle or mostly-idle, its long-term energy usage (and thus operating cost) could easily be higher with AMD than with an Intel processor that has excessive peak power draw but better idle power management.

(Are there any business-oriented AMD desktop PCs with Energy Star or similar certifications, or are those regulations too loose to matter here?)

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Zen 4 will have a 6nm I/O die from TSMC, power usage ought to be lower.

That new IO die is by far the most important and interesting thing about their upcoming generation. Basic graphics capability as a universal feature, hopefully better idle power, DDR5 and PCIe gen5, while the compute chiplets will seemingly be getting fairly modest performance improvements.

A process shrink for the compute cores is always nice. 15% single core performance is always nice.

> AMD desktop processors currently have really bad idle power because of the chiplet-based design with an outdated 14nm IO die

Unless you use one of their fairly popular APUs, I assume? I got something something like 15 W on idle at the plug for an OEM AMD box. Is that a lot?

I was ignoring their desktop APUs, yes, because AMD seems to do quite a lot of that themselves. As repackaged laptop SoCs, they're decent at idle power, and they're fine if you only need mid-range performance and last year's features out of your desktop.

Of note is that pairing the desktop APU with one of the higher end desktop chipsets will still have the chipset (which is just another legacy IO die) have the excessive 10-15W idle consumption it would anyway.

I'm not sure if the Bx50 chipsets are any more efficient or if that needs the absolute low end of A series chipsets (that I believe are instead some ASMedia designed IO stuff).

> I got something something like 15 W on idle at the plug for an OEM AMD box. Is that a lot?

What kind of systems are those? I’ll need something like this soon.

I got a ThinkCentre M75t Gen 2 with a 4750G. Note that this was out of the box; when I added two more memory modules to get 48 GB of RAM, it rose to ~20 W on idle, but I kind of expected that.

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