Quote Originally Posted by Sentential View Post
You point about power draw is very valid. However what you fail to note is that there is a difference between power draw and heat dissipation. Simply because you make a chip with a low wattage count does not gaurntee that it will not spew all of the power as heat disspation due to leakage.

Phenom = High Power Draw + SSDOI = Low Leakage = Low Temps
i7 = Lower Power Draw + High K = High Leakage = High Temps

Also you need to factor that Intel and AMD historically measure TDP differently. One is theoritcal TDP max (AMD) the other is normal operating enviroment (Intel)
Your point is supported by the measured evidence. Here is a clue:

AMD's transistors exhibit very low channel leakage. Our transistor benchmarks indicates that leakage current is less than one-third of the value measured on AMD's 65-nm process. It's also significantly lower than the Intel 45-nm HKMG process. In fact the Ion/Ioff ratio for AMD's PFET is nearly 10 times better than that for the Intel PFET.