For past few years, Intel has been ruling the processor market as their Xeon chips not only offers better performance but also lower power consumption. And, as AMD is not able to match Intel’s processor performance they are doing the only thing they can do, toss another acronym “ACP” to show that their processors are better.
AMD says the ACP is the truth about power consumption. ACP stands for Average CPU Power and according to AMD it is designed to give customers a more accurate idea of the power consumed by the processor, which is not provided by TDP (Thermal Design Power). The ACP values for each power band include the power for the cores, memory controller and HyperTransport links.
The five new processors that AMD announced are part of Opteron HE series and have ACP of 55 watts. The processors are 2376 HE price $575, 2374 HE priced $450, 2372 HE priced $316, 8376 HE priced $1,514 and 8374 HE priced $1,165. The HE processor will have speeds ranging from 2.1GHz to 2.3GHz and they are designed to address requirements for data centers.
AMD says that the ACP of these processors will be in mid-40s range, even though their TDP will be 79 watts, which is similar to Intel’s 2.66GHz Xeon quad core E5430 processor. This shows that AMD has tossed up a new acronym ACP for power consumption just to make power requirement of their processors seem lower on paper when compared to Intel’s TDP rating.
Along with HE processors, AMD has also released high performance SE processors that run at 2.8GHz and have 105 watts ACP (137W TDP). There will be two SE processors 2386 SE for $1,165 and 8386 SE priced $2,649. You can get more information about ACP from a white paper published by AMD.