Anandtech reviews the energy needs of Nehalem

[anubis]

Take power efficiency into account however and then Nehalem gets more interesting to more people. Right now we're only talking about 130W TDP parts, which means that the power efficiency really only applies to someone looking to replace a QX9770. Going forward, when Intel can deliver a 95W, 65W or even lower TDP based on the Nehalem then there may be a compelling power efficiency story. A 10 - 20% decrease in power consumption, at the same manufacturing process, is nothing to scoff at. Then a year from now we get the same architecture built on 32nm, which will hopefully give us an even further reduction in power consumption. It's weird to say, but Nehalem may end up being an incredibly good architecture for notebooks. Keep that in mind before buying those new MacBooks guys.

The power efficiency story gets even more exciting when you realize that these gains come with no change in manufacturing process. Pardon the pun, but the next tick is going to be a cool one.

Nice read as always from Anand
Link

[deathman20]

Well power efficiency looking at it as well while the i7 might be a 130W TDP, compared to the C2D 130W TDP. Take into consideration you have a NB onboard as well which should in theory decrease power consumption by the whole system then. So more performance for less power all around, if the X58 board doesn't suck up power else where on the board itself.

[Bobsama]

Not to mention how much faster Nehalem is... and Intel increased performance faster than they increased power consumption. IIRC, you need a 2% performance boost to justify a 1% power draw increase. If it didn't make the cut, it was cut.

[Lestat]

Not to mention how much faster Nehalem is...

thats subjective to what you are doing and any gamer isnt going to gain anything, normal pc users who have a nice quad already arent going to see much of any gains.
servers, crunchers, photoshop users, video encoders, etc those type of users will.
So to say its faster is subjective.

[Hornet331]

thats subjective to what you are doing and any gamer isnt going to gain anything, normal pc users who have a nice quad already arent going to see much of any gains.
servers, crunchers, photoshop users, video encoders, etc those type of users will.
So to say its faster is subjective.

Only if the "gamer" gimps himself with a midrange card. Look up reviews where they are using a 280gtx or better -> a 920 comes very close to a QX9770 and a 940 beats it everywhere else.

A oced 4870/260gtx is the minimum to put in a nehalem system, else you have a serious gpu bottleneck even up to resolutions of 1280x1024, and after 1650x1050 your gpu bottlenecked anyways (beside SLI/CF )

[Shintai]

Thats some serious nice power numbers.

I cant wait for the 32nm version.

Oh, and so much for IMC uses alot of power blabla we had to hear for the last few years.

[Jacky]

thats subjective to what you are doing and any gamer isnt going to gain anything, normal pc users who have a nice quad already arent going to see much of any gains.
servers, crunchers, photoshop users, video encoders, etc those type of users will.
So to say its faster is subjective.

You know it's not true that they won't gain anything. Maybe, most probably, they won't gain anything noticeable.
Even 5-10% improvements aren't nill in the world of highly optimised x86 processors - that's penryn-level improvement and we call that arch "faster" than merom.

I really love the idle and single-threaded power draw, it seems that (individual) power gating is doing wonders if configured properly. The difference is substantial against the QX9770, the article also implies that lower voltage mainstream and laptop parts will compare very favourably to anything else by Intel.