Ryzen has been more power friendly than Intel Core for a while now. I don't think consumers care much about eco friendliness, though, which is a shame. I suppose it could always be sold as "doesn't heat up the room as much", but anyone with a dedicated GPU will have a computational space heater sitting next to them regardless these days.
Gaining popularity in the ever shrinking market of PCs is nothing to brag about. I'd wager it's still not that popular as you make it be. Everyone just buys laptops nowadays and whoever they do buy PCs they get the full sized towers with discrete GPUs for gaming, not small form factors with APUs. That's more of a niche of a niche.
That's why AMD hasn't focused too much on APUs for desktop PCs. It's not a big market. Their biggest sellers are APUs for notebooks and consoles, CPUs for datacenters and desktops, discrete GPUs for ... everything.
It's been an "ever shrinking market" since the 2000s, if you believe the news.
A thing to consider is, for the consumer market, machines have gotten good enough that most don't need a new machine for 5+ years, in terms of performance. Especially for casual household tasks.
No, you are right. I think this APU is basically a spin-off mobile processor. The technology comparison would be translatable, though, as with laptops battery life and weight matters.
However, here we talk about the desktop market, don't we? And not every desktop PC has to be a gaming capable machine. Power-savings will probably be even more relevant for organizations running hundreds of office machines and terminals.
>And not every desktop PC has to be a gaming capable machine.
Yes, but desktop PCs not for gaming aren't really selling volumes nowadays, they're a tiny niche being eaten by notebooks and NUCs (also a niche) which Intel has been dominating as they had CPUs with iGPUs (basically APUs without the marketing) since ... forever.
>Power-savings will probably be even more relevant for organizations running hundreds of office machines and terminals.
When was the last time you saw organizations buy PCs for their workforce? In volume I mean, not just one PC for Bob who needed a CAD workstation, because then Bob most likely isn't getting an APU for CAD but some workstation with discrete CPU and some Quadro GPU.
Organizations mostly transitioned their office machines to notebooks a long time ago, even moreso after WFH became more popular so there was less need of PCs tied to a fixed location. PCs not for gaming or heavy compute workstations aren't big sellers anymore.
Yeah, I'm sure governments do buy some amount of desktop PCs because they don't intend for their workforce to work from anywhere else other than a specific office, but you also can't tell me with a straight face that selling PCs to the DMV, FBI and other bureaucrats represents a big lucrative market that was waiting for the APU revolution.
PCs are a low selling niche now. APUs won't move the needle on that, that's why AMD ignored it for so long. End of story.
Economics matter. People can value a lot of things, but if there's too few of them, then the market won't bother catering to them. See small smartphones.
For mobile processors, it's one of the first things I look at though. And like you and others said I don't just look at the TDP but also rely on the big testing sites for load heat tests.
Or, at least, I did until the m series processors came out and you could get a passively cooled laptop for a decent price.
Maybe not everyone but I definitely care. Lower consumption means smaller PSU and cooling requirements and less issues during heatwaves (no AC). Futhermore, my computer corner with a fair bit of electronics is served by only one electricity socket with a bunch of extensions cords that I really would rather not overload.
I think that yes they're more power friendly when doing work, but consume more power at idle than Intel CPUs. At least that used be the case, don't know if that's still the case.
As for eco-friendliness... it's something I now consider when buying electronics but more from an electricity bill point of view.
Most of AMD's desktop processors for the past several generations have had poor idle power because they're built using multiple chiplets with a cheap, power-hungry interconnect. The 8000G series (and earlier -G parts) are monolithic laptop processors re-packaged for the desktop socket, so they are unaffected by the main cause of poor idle power in AMD's main desktop processor product line.
Also, most CPUs spend most of their time idling or very low load, not belching hellfire upon the scorched earth. Efficiency at idle/low power is far more significant than efficiency at flame belching if power consumption over time is concerned.
I recall this blog post[1], discussed here[2] at the time, discussing how a SATA chip driver prevented the CPU from going to sleep state C6, instead keeping it at C3, leading to higher power consumption.
Switching the SATA card to one with a different chip fixed that.
There were other surprising factors which affected power draw.
My takeaway was that as in real life, sleeping can be hard.
Oh lol. Opened the links in new tab but didn't read before commenting, classic n00b fail. The "visited" look didn't phase me since I had, as mentioned, read it here before.
How big is the difference on a regular setup? And is it a same kind of cpu, with integrated graphics? One of the example you linked says 7 watt, which is impressive, but I think you could achieve similar optimizations on an amd system.
Let's say I install windows or some linux desktop and don't do any optimizations, how big is the difference?
