Let’s face it, performance and energy consumption matter when dealing with CPUs. Not only that, you may be getting what you think with either of the big names…

If there’s one lesson to be learned from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices’ weeklong spat over server power consumption, it’s that test drives are important.

Assessing only pure performance is passe. The debate these days is about performance-per-watt, which seems like it should be a simple miles-per-gallon type of calculation. However, miles are miles, and gallons are gallons. There’s no one simple way to measure processor performance, and measuring the amount of power output by today’s chips is proving just as difficult.

“We do have industry-standard benchmarks for performance, however imperfect they may be,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. “We do not have industry-standard benchmarks for performance-per-watt,” he said, adding that it might be some time before those are developed.

Intel and AMD have taken to the PowerPoint slides over the past week, presenting different ideas of how much power is consumed by the other’s platform. After AMD took the first shots last week during its analyst meeting, Intel countered with a briefing Friday morning with Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s server group…. Source: News.com