AMD's going through some rough times, no doubt about it, but for fanboys of the CPU maker (wait, do CPU fanboys still exist?) here's your feel-good story of the year. The always-thorough Tom's Hardware has pit Intel's 1.6GHz Atom 230 processor against AMD's Athlon 64 2000+, and the results just might surprise you. The 1GHz Athlon (with a core voltage of 0.90 volts and a power draw of just 8 watts) managed to best the aforementioned Atom in both energy consumption and processing power tests. The gurus at Tom's credited the more modern 790G platform and the highly efficient K8 architecture as big players in the Athlon's strong showing, finally deeming said chip "more economical, faster and quieter" than the Atom. We know you're in disbelief -- good thing there are 14 pages of proof waiting in the read link.

[Thanks, Carl]

If you were shaken to your very core at the recent report that SSDs may not be as power-friendly as you'd been led to believe, drive-maker STEC wants to talk you down from the ledge. According to the company's Patrick Wilkison, the Tom's Hardware article which benchmarked (and gave failing grades) to power-consumption of the non-mechanical drives was flawed because, "They are using legacy drives, none of which will be used by any major PC OEM." According to Patrick (whose job, you might note, is to sell SSDs), new versions of the drives will / do have intelligent power management which circumvents the issues that report shed light on. Wilkison goes on to say that, "Drives will need to have very intelligent power management systems. Some of these SSDs will have them, and those (that) do not have such power intelligence will not be used (by PC makers)." So it's sort of like saying a car you buy in the future will get better gas mileage than the one you own now, provided the automaker cares about fuel efficiency. Small solace, we'd say.

Update: We've gotten a statement from Micron concerning the report -- you can check it out after the break.

If you just shelled out some pretty pennies for the a high-speed, low-power SSD, Tom's Hardware may have stumbled onto some findings that won't sit well. According to a rigorous benchmarking session, they discovered that not only do the drives not save you battery power... they eat more of it. How is this possible you ask? Well mechanical drives only hit peak drainage when the actuator has to move the heads, whereas SSDs use full power whenever they're in use, so the end result is actually a diminished efficiency. What that means is that the hype over "green" drives may be just that: pure hype. On the other hand, you're still getting a drive with no moving parts, which at least makes your data more secure, if not more eco-friendly.

[Via Eeeuser; Thanks, Tony]

We had a hunch NVIDIA was prepping Hybrid SLI technology, and although it's taken over half a year for it to go official, we suppose now's better than never. As we already knew, the tech's primary purpose in life is to increase graphics performance and decrease power consumption simultaneously, and apparently, it will soon be incorporated into a "wide variety of graphics and motherboard desktop and notebook products." In case you've forgotten, Hybrid SLI enables NVIDIA motherboard GPUs to work cooperatively with discrete NVIDIA GPUs when paired in the same PC platform, and only the GPU(s) needed will be called upon in order to save energy (and battery life in laptops). For more on what upcoming products will sport the technology, head on down to the read link.

[Via HotHardware]

So, the graphics might just be warmed over GameCube fare, but the Wii sure does take those wimpy specs and runs with 'em. A new showdown between the big three home consoles and a mid-range PC doesn't compare games or GPUs, but rather power consumption, and the Wii wins by a landslide. The watts don't just bleed during gameplay, DVD playback seems to require immense effort from the 360 and PS3, and even the consoles in "idle" mode consume about ten times the watts of the Wii. Of course, the consoles consume a minimal amount of power in standby, which is substantially more when the Wii's Connect24 service is on, but not quite a deal breaker, just about a $1 a month of power. So if you're looking to shave a few bucks off your power bill or do your treehuggin' duty to the environment, it looks like the choice is fairly obvious -- though you'll naturally have to look elsewhere than the Wii to get your video playback kicks.

[Via Joystiq]

When it comes to wireless peripherals, every little bit of battery life counts, so a modder named Ram Sripracha was a little concerned when he noticed that the LED on his new Bluetooth Mighty Mouse stayed lit even when the device was on standby. Since he was already handy with the tools of the trade, Ram cracked open the mouse to test its power consumption with his trusty multimeter, and discovered that it was actually sucking more juice when sitting idle (about .0450 amps) than when in use (around .0285 amps). With the rodent already splayed out on his desk, Ram decided to remove the LED himself and retest the current draw; sure enough, it only used .0017 amps without the light on, or about 3.9% of its draw in an unaltered state. Luckily for you, he also posted an illustrated, step-by-step guide on how to perform this surgery yourself, but be warned that Apple's crack design team made sure that disassembly is more difficult than just unfastening a couple of screws. Also bear in mind that this is just one person's experience, so you'll probably want to make sure that your Mighty Mouse is putting on this perpetual light show as well before you break out the silicone glue and soldering iron.

[Via Hack-A-Day]

No surprises here: we've known since last WinHEC that Samsung was working on a so-called ReadyDrive hard drive that sports a 128MB flash buffer for enabling lower laptop power consumption, and just as we suspected, they've unveiled a working prototype of the technology at this year's conference. Also on hand with their own ReadyDrive was Seagate, who, like Samsung, plan to release their model when Vista finally starts shipping, as only the next-gen operating system will have the proper ATA driver command sets to allow for such a large buffer. PCMag was on the scene for one of Samsung's demos, and claim that a laptop running an office apps script only needed to access the hard drive every three to four minutes, which could result in ReadyDrive-equipped laptops sipping up to 40% less juice than models with those outdated, perpetually-spinning HDDs.