Quote Originally Posted by Shadowmage View Post
Is the 30% lower power consumption = total power consumption, or just dynamic power consumption?
Its just the dynamic power consumption, which is more than 90% of total power consumption.
The transistors of the 45nm Intel process are needing 30% less energy (30% lower power consumption) for transistor switching, compared to their 65nm process.
The static power(the current leakage) on the 45nm is reduced more than 5 times in the drain-source and more than 10 times in the gate oxide, compared to Intel's 65nm at same frequency. At 20% higher frequency the 45nm CPU will have roughly same(a little beat lower) leakage than the 65nm. Intel can either reduce the leakage or increase the frequency for 20%.

Also, you're forgetting that P_dyn = CfV^2, where C is just some constant.
C is the cumulative capacitance which is not a constant, but a variable. Its value depends of the number of transistors involved in a certain situation. The more the operations(more stages working) are being performed at once, the more transistors are involved and are forced to switch, thus to consume more energy.
If we have two same clocked CPUs with same architecture, working at same voltage, but the one built on Intel's 45nm and the other on Intel's 65nm, for the same task the dynamic component of the total power consumption 45nm CPU will consume 30% less energy to accomplish the task.
The 45nm Intel CPUs have lower Vcore than the 65nm, which will significantly reduce the power consumption further.


@nn_step
Again, you are unable to understand the quotes you are posting and you are unable to support your claims. The 286 is similar to 386, the 386 is similar to 486 and the 486 is similar to Pentium, but the 286 is very different compared to the Pentium. I can't figure out what the author of the article was thinking, but the number of stages is not the only factor on which depends the frequency. The 286 has 134000, the 386 has 275000, the 486 has 1200000 and the Pentium(1st gen) has 3100000 transistors. If what the author of the article said was true, then why the Intel 80286 and the Intel 80386, which were produced on exactly the same 1500nm process are clocked differently? The 80286 frequencies are 6-25Mhz, while the 80386 are 16-40MHz. The same story is about the 486 and the 1st gen Pentium, both are made on the same 800nm process. The 80486 has frequencies of 25-100Mhz, while the 1st gen Pentium has 60-66MHz.