I really wish that someone would review CPUs at similar power levels, rather than TDP when there is a big difference between the two models.
Also, there is no idle power comparison, something that may also differ significantly and affect Linux.
Also, there is no idle power comparison, something that may also differ significantly and affect Linux.
Basically how many watts required to do some fix unit of work (to render 1 frame using Blender CPU rendering)
You can do an unlimited amount of computation on one joule. One watt-second, if you like.
Not an infinite amount of computation, but any finite amount.
In that test, the CPUs are running on an open-air test bench with a 360mm AIO liquid cooler with the fans running at 100%. I don't think any of us are going to be running the CPUs like that, and that type of cooling encourages the CPUs to draw way more power - because they can draw much more power without overheating.
What I'd want in a test is to take some reasonable cooling solution (reasonable varies from person to person, of course) like a high-quality 140mm tower cooler or a 240mm AIO, in a computer case with the fans running at a silent or slightly above silent level. Then see what type of power and performance you get out of it.
The rationale is that each architecture has a sweet spot consumption/performance, and increasing performance over a certain threshold has increasing costs (AFAIK, one significant factor is the increase of voltage in order to push frequencies higher).
I don't know the numbers, but AMD has been offering the 65W threshold for a while, so it can be reasonably assumed that 65W is the sweet spot performance/consumption.
The reason for not buying directly a cheaper model is the number of cores - one may choose, say, a 65W-throttled CPU with 16 cores over an unthrottled 8-cores (in some scenarios, this can make sense).
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17585/amd-zen-4-ryzen-9-7950x...
(2) Cooling budget on servers.
Both are very significant limiting factors for non-gaming applications.
Top gaming rigs are the dragsters of computing: no power consumption is too high, no hardware contraption is too large. But most people, and most businesses, don't drive dragsters.
As CPU frequency goes down, it waits less cycles for RAM. Practically it's a bit of a copout since keeping your RAM at high clocks/voltages doesn't effect more CPU TDP but does use more power. It might explain some of the irregularities in testing at least.