ExtremeTech
Intel’s Desktop TDPs No Longer Useful to Predict CPU Power Consumption By Joel Hruska on January 25, 2021 at 1:46 pm
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Of all the metrics we commonly discuss at ExtremeTech, we’d argue TDP (Thermal Design Power) is easily the worst. If clock speed, core counts, IPC, and memory bandwidth are imperfect methods of comparing the capabilities of two processors, TDP at least as it’s communicated on current Intel desktop CPUs has moved past imperfection and is now downright bad.
Anandtech recently published a deep dive into the power consumption and behavior of two different Intel Comet Lake processors. The Core i7-10700K (8C/16T, 3.8GHz base, 5.1GHz peak, 4.7GHz all-core, 125W TDP) was compared against the Core i7-10700 (8C/16T, 2.9GHz base, 4.8GHz peak, 4.6GHz all-core, 65W TDP). The point of the comparison was to measure the performance of the 65W CPU, with its m