Intel vs. AMD Performance-Per-Watt On Ubuntu 14.04 Linux

To complement the many Intel vs. AMD CPU/APU Linux benchmarks published earlier this week as part of our AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU coverage, here's some results mostly examining the performance-per-Watt and overall system power consumption of the many different Intel and AMD processors running Ubuntu Linux.

With most of the same CPU/APUs as used in the Intel/AMD Linux article earlier this week, the system power draw was monitored via the Phoronix Test Suite through a USB-based WattsUp power meter measuring the overall AC power draw of the system (it's as easy as setting the MONITOR=sys.power for the Phoronix Test Suite's power monitoring support) and then also charting the performance-per-Watt result for each benchmark (again, with our automated benchmarking software it's just a matter of setting the PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variable). The CPU temperatures were also monitored automatically (set MONITOR=cpu.temp) except for the AMD A10-7850K Kaveri APU the kernel driver doesn't yet have the ID for this CPU so there was no thermal monitoring supported but it should be added for the Linux 3.14 kernel.

The power / performance data was recorded from Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 in its current development state and using a Git snapshot of the Linux 3.13 kernel. The integrated graphics were used on each of the processors while all other system components remained the same where possible during testing. On the following pages are these basic performance-per-Watt results for those wanting another metric beyond our extensive Intel/AMD Linux tests from Thursday.

The APU/CPUs used for this article included the Intel Core i3 2120, Core i5 3470, Core i7 3770K, Core i3 4130, Core i5 4670, Core i7 4770K, and AMD A10-7850K Kaveri.