Athlon Vs. Atom: Duel Of The Energy Savers : AMD Athlon 64 2000+ At 8 Watts

[ixania]

Compared to Intel’s Atom, which runs at 1.6 GHz, the Athlon 64 2000+ is clocked at 1 GHz—60% lower. Despite this, the Athlon 64 outperforms the Atom in several benchmark tests as a result of its more efficient K8 architecture. In addition, the energy consumption of the entire system is lower, and that’s what really matters most.

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A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How?

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