GourdApr 14

The Pentium MMX 233 MHz, a near top of the line desktop CPU of its day, has a maximum power draw of 21.5.

Holy shit have CPU manufacturers just turned to "more power" like it's freaking Home Improvement to juice their specs.

The whole desktop has a 235 W power supply, less than many current gaming graphics cards draw.

#retrocomputing

Show threadJohannesApr 14

@gourd Current CPUs are actually pretty efficient and even their total power draw is rather low when you look at it on a per CPU core basis. Per CPU core power draw is often lower than those 21 W of that Pentium MMX, while being magnitudes faster.

Probably the worst offender with regards to efficiency was the Pentium 4.

Show threadGourdApr 14
@wej I mean, I'd still argue the amount to compare against is the entire CPU. That's still one chip designed to run one system, they've just scaled up the power in both computing and energy in a different way.
Show threadJohannes
@gourd Ok, let's compare entire CPUs then. A while ago I've built myself an #AMD #AM5 system with a Ryzen 7 8700G CPU, a mid-range CPU at the time, so comparable in class to the then mid-range Pentium 233MMX.
That Ryzen CPU draws 88 W at full load, so a little over 4 times the power of the P233. When you run the 7-zip benchmark on both CPUs, you'll get a score of about 150 on the P233 compared to about 88000 on the Ryzen. That is almost 600 times faster while drawing less than 5 times the power.
Apr 15 at 12:52amWeb
Show threadJohannesApr 15
@gourd What's maybe even more impressive with modern CPUs, is their idle power draw. A Pentium MMX would almost draw the same power no matter if it is doing anything or not. A modern CPU uses power-gating to turn off most of its circuitry while not in use. My Ryzen system (which admittedly I built with power consumption in mind, so I've selected parts that allow for low idle power consumption), draws less than 8 W for the entire system when idling at the desktop. That's not too bad I think.