Quote Originally Posted by qcmadness View Post
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...3_3.html#sect0
You can't compare that to ampere numbers.

In case you haven't noticed, there are heatsinks and heatpipes on the power regulators. Which means that they consume a considerable amount of power.

In this case we measured the power consumption along the 12 V power line connected to the CPU voltage regulator, which means that the numbers above include the power losses that occur in the mainboard voltage regulator too
So that measurement isn't reliable, besides, some of the power in that cable can be used for other stuff, it depends on motherboard design. Compare i7 with Phenom II. i7 often uses less power in load than a Phenom II when measuerd at the 12V, but uses a whole lot more when measured before the PSU. And that is in CPU intensive tasks with otherwise equal hardware. Intel might prefer to use more power from the ATX-connector, and AMD might prefer to use some power from 12v for memory and NB. You can't know that if you isn't involved in the design of those motherboards.
The only things we do know in the matter is that motherboard layout matters, power regulation uses a whole lot of power, and there are some big differences between AMD and Intel on 12v power draw vs PSU draw.

So, with that taken into consideration, It's safe to say that you can't use those numbers to determine actual power usage for the CPU.