[Mercury_22]

Those familiar with the processor business will be familiar with the term Thermal Design Power (TDP), which refers to the number of watts that a cooling system must dissipate under a maximum real program load. AMD, however, has adopted a different power measurement system to rate its processors.

The new system, dubbed Average CPU Power (ACP), was championed by AMD for the first time with the release of its K10 (Phenom) line. AMD claims ACP is comparable to TDP measurements in Intel's benchmarks and is in fact a superior measuring stick for power consumption. ACP is described as being calculated based on an "average" daily use scenario for desktop users or for a server.

Despite AMD's claims that ACP is directly comparable with TDP, many began to have doubts when AMD struggled to raise the speeds on its Phenom processors. This could indicate, among other things, thermal issues due to high power consumption. With its processors still in the lower half of the 2 GHz range, the AMD documentation has been combed over to evaluate AMD's claims and determine the true story of ACP.

The results are startling. The story is best explained by two versions of a white paper ironically titled "ACP – The Truth About Power Consumption Starts Here," -- the old version can be found here and the new version here.

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