> I get the general impression that the AMD CPU has higher power consumption in all regards: the baseline is higher, the spikes are higher (peak consumption) and it spikes more often / for longer.
> Looking at my energy meter statistics, I usually ended up at about 9.x kWh per day for a two-person household, cooking with induction.
> After switching my PC from Intel to AMD, I end up at 10-11 kWh per day.
It's been the bane of desktop AMD CPUs since Zen 1. Hopefully AMD will address this in Zen 6 but I don't have too much hope.
Their APUs don't have the problem from the reviews I've seen, but yes the I/O die has been the bane of the Zen platform when it comes to idle power consumption.
To make matters worse, the x570 chipset basically runs this I/O die upside down as a chipset and sucks twice as much power at idle as the x470 chipset it replaced. I expected them to replace this hack of a product used for the high end when Asmedia's efforts were delayed but all that platform got was B550. It was pretty clear they weren't chasing this part of the market during AM4's heydey, no real idea where they are at now with chipsets on AM5. But given few people talked about how crappy that chipset was in this respect I guess they might be right it wasn't important to most people.
What are you talking about? AMD has been really good at the power efficiency department until the 3D CPUs that use extra power for cache memory that simply cannot be turned off. Plus, Intel started applying the 3nm fabrication process, while AMD is still at 4nm. But previously, Intel was at 10nm for a long time, see i9-13900K for example, while Ryzen went to 5nm much sooner, see Ryzen 9 7900x.
I don't bloody care that AMD CPUs seem to be more power efficient than Intel's. For most people their CPUs are completely idle most of the time and Zen CPUs on average idle at 25W or MORE.
Many Zen 4 and Zen 5 owners report that their desktop CPUs idle at 40W or more even without the 3D cache.
Could it be that that some cores are constantly being waked up by something?
I mention that since you seem to be on Windows, which itself has a hard time to just shut up, but that is also easily paired with bad drivers, stupid software and bad peripherals.
> I mention that since you seem to be on Windows, which itself has a hard time to just shut up, but that is also easily paired with bad drivers, stupid software and bad peripherals.
I happen to be on Fedora Linux 42 and Windows 11 but my primary OS has been Linux for almost 30 years now.
Idle power consumption under Windows and Linux is exactly the same. Linux doesn't have any magical tricks to make it lower.
Windows has more services running in background but they don't meaningfully affect idle power consumption at all.
The entire Reddit topic confirms my statement, multiple over hundreds of reviews confirm what I said, yet it's
> paired with bad drivers, stupid software and bad peripherals.
It's kinda hard to be an AMD fan when you live in an alternative reality, huh?
> It's kinda hard to be an AMD fan when you live in an alternative reality, huh?
I don't know, as I am not too much intimate with both concepts. I meant to say if both measure idle power but come with different results, are they measuring the same? Could hardware and software differences influence idle power? What values does an "idle power reading" measure actually?
> I get the general impression that the AMD CPU has higher power consumption in all regards: the baseline is higher, the spikes are higher (peak consumption) and it spikes more often / for longer.
> Looking at my energy meter statistics, I usually ended up at about 9.x kWh per day for a two-person household, cooking with induction.
> After switching my PC from Intel to AMD, I end up at 10-11 kWh per day.
It's been the bane of desktop AMD CPUs since Zen 1. Hopefully AMD will address this in Zen 6 but I don't have too much hope.