Power Management 

Power Efficiency

AMD Powers Efficient Datacenters: Comparing Power Consumption

When server efficiency matters, it's not enough to compare spec sheets. AMD delivers power efficiency at three real-world workloads.

Industry-Leading Performance-per-Watt

Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors can deliver a significant performance increase over Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors while operating within the exact same power and thermal envelopes, offering IT organizations ground-breaking performance-per-watt without increased data center energy consumption or the associated power and cooling costs.

Both Six-Core and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors offer outstanding energy efficiency through the AMD-P suite of power management features:

Integrated DDR2 DRAM Memory Controller: Low-Power Memory To Reduce Power Consumption

AMD's Integrated Memory Controller works exclusively with high bandwidth, energy-efficient DDR2 memory. It incorporates Memory RAS for increased fault tolerance to reduce system downtime and increase system reliability.

DDR2 memory can improve overall TCO by reducing memory power consumption almost 8 watts per DIMM compared to Fully Buffered DIMM memory technology.

A More Relevant Way to Measure Processor Power
Average CPU Power (ACP)

Customers prefer a more accurate way to account for processor power rather than engineering Thermal Design Power (TDP).  Over-estimating power budgets by leveraging engineering design limits can lead to wasted data center space and inefficiencies.  So AMD has defined a new metric offering users a more useful way to evaluate typical processor power consumption.  ACP values are determined by measuring processor power consumption including power for the cores, memory controller and HyperTransport™ Technology links while running accurate and relevant commercially useful high utilization workloads.
For more information read the Average CPU Power white paper (PDF).