[citation][nom]Raiddinn[/nom]Wattage used is very important. So is requirements in terms of associated hardware.If, hypothetically, AMD came out with a processor that was twice as good as its FX-8150 and that just blew away anything that Intel offered even on lightly threaded benchmarks EXCEPT it used 1000w to do that, the processor would straight up fail in the marketplace.Performance per watt is an important measure and AMD is failing massively at it. When you don't have performance per watt, you have to spend a lot more money on a PSU to try to counter the effect and you have to spend a whole lot more on power bills in general. That just kills the value proposition over the long term.Even if that 1000w AMD ultra processor was priced at like $50, the net effect on the power bill would destroy its whole value proposition without even considering that you have to pay $150 for a PSU just to run the thing.Sure, AMD may be doing OK wattage wise with its teensy tiny dual core llanos, but that isn't going to sustain the company when every performance oriented processor gives poor performance/watt.AMD needs all of its processors to deliver results, not the cheapest 5%. The cheapest 5% are usually making barely any profits at all or often sold at a loss just to try to hurt competitors. These don't usually keep the lights on for any kind of company.The results of the most expensive 5% are 2x the wattage for less than 1x the performance and that just doesn't cut it.Supall - You probably don't need Trinity to replace the 6 year old system. Your father could probably get by just fine with an A8-3870k that is already out.Also, it really hurts the APU value proposition when you have to buy much faster RAM in order to use its capabilities. You CAN use an A8-3870k's built in graphics with 1333 RAM (and many OEM PCs ship like that), however, if you look at the benchmarks the graphics performance suffers horribly compared to what the chip is capable of.To unlock that performance requires getting 1866, 2000, 2133, etc RAM. That is more expensive than 1333 RAM although the gap is narrowing over time. That has to be factored into the total system cost and makes the deal even worse for someone considering between APU vs Processor + video card.When you factor in the higher performance RAM you need into the total solution cost, its usually the processor + video card setups that come out ahead, as if they aren't already ahead in every other area to begin with.The tiny niches where AMD is the right choice are few and far between, that is why Intel sells 5 processors for every 1 AMD sells.[/citation]
Trinity and even Llano have had a decent battery life and power consumption advantage over Intel for quite a while. Ivy didn't destroy this and Haswell might, but Trinity's successor will probably bring that to a halt regardless of Haswell's success compared to Llano and Trinity anyway.
If you simply disable the second core of each module, not even going into the more complex but still not too difficult P state altering, AMD's gaming performance per watt goes up incredibly. For the FX-81xx CPUs, you cut power consumption by 35-45% while increasing gaming performance in all but the most highly threaded of games by a decent 15-25%. By these easily obtained numbers, worst case scenario, the 81xx CPUs increase gaming performance per watt by over 50%. These CPUs are excellent at undervolting too, so we could easily throw either that or overclocking into the mix. Without increasing the voltage, overclocking shouldn't hurt power efficiency. This does nothing for AMD's stock power efficiency, but if they wanted to, an OEM or whoever could set this up in their pre-builts for AMD and so could any other group/company that sells computers.
The difference between PSU required for Inte's CPUs and AMD's CPUs is minimal. It'd be like the difference between needing a 400W and a 430W or 450W PSU for the same job.
DDR3-1600 and even DDR3-1866 kits can be found for about the same price as to slightly more expensive than 1333 and for those who want to, there's RAM overclocking.