Phenom power consumption

[thilanliyan]

Why does Phenom have such high power consumption even at <3GHz?

Also, I just noticed from the AT review of the B3 versions, power consumption went up like 40w at load. Why is that?

 

[Extelleron]

Well for one AMD's 65nm process is not the best, to say it lightly. Even AMD's 65nm K8 CPUs did not take up much less power than their 90nm counterparts.

Phenom itself is just a power hungry design, it seems... voltage is not TOO high, Q6600 voltage can be as high as 1.325V meanwhile Phenom seems to be 1.3V or lower.

As for the B3 CPU using a lot more power, it's likely that the TLB patch reduced power consumption and perhaps the 9550 sample Anandtech received was not very good (seems that way, because "125W" 9750 is not consuming much more power at all than the "95W" 9550 in their tests).