Monday, October 23, 2017

Watts Up! Newer PC's are more power efficient than older ones...right?


Newer is always better.  New cars are more fuel efficient, have lots of features we couldn't even dream of just a few years ago and are of course safer.  Although that last part just seems to underline how bad our driving habits have become.  Speaking of bad habits...   

Smart phones, well, they're old 10 minutes after you open the box.   You see the look on the Best Buy clerk when they proclaim your 6 month old phone as "ancient."

So if we took say a 7 year old PC with an Intel Xeon processor and compared it's power consumption with a newer PC, say a 7700K the results should be obvious.

Well, maybe so, maybe not.  Intel has introduced a new processor family almost every year for the past few years but the changes have really been minimal.

For Example, Sandy Bridge was the followup to the legendary Nehalem processors but for many fell short of expectations.  Yes the venerable 2600K came out of that family and for many nothing after it quite measured up.

The process technology has improved over the past 7 generations of Intel CPU which should translate to dramatic differences in power efficiency.  Operative word being, "should."

Watch the results below.