- Feb 12, 2013
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The designs are way too different for any kind of proper comparison. I haven't worked too much on recent Intel designs, but I would say AMD has better power management than the most recent Intel designs do. That's the result of being so far behind in both the process technology and the design itself, however that's definitely not a bad thing.
Once AMD has access to smaller manufacturing process (such as the 14nm LPP) their power efficiency will be pretty hard to compete with. Let's just hope the new architechture lives up to the expectations.
While the power management in Carrizo for example is extremely advanced and effective, there are still some things which need to be improved heavily. Basically none of the features of the power management are documented, let alone properly. Because the lack of documentation, the system manufacturers are unable to tune the power management properly to provide the best possible performance on their system.
I have personally spent maybe < 800 hours on the SMU, PMU and PMC on Steamroller and Excavator. Without the breakthroughs I made on Steamroller (i.e learnt how to program and configure the SMU) I couldn't change a single setting either on Steamroller or Excavator, despite having access to the same documents as the manufacturers do. Most of the time the stuff just isn't documented at all and when it is, it is done either poorly or just wrong.
Are these documents usually under NDA or are they open like the gcn isa docs?