- Thermal Design Power
The Thermal Design Power (TDP) (sometimes called Thermal Design Point) represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is required to dissipate. For example, a
laptop 's CPU cooling system may be designed for a 20 W TDP, which means that it can dissipate (either via an active cooling method such as a fan, a passive cooling method via naturalconvection , viaheat radiation or all three modes of heat transfer) 20watt s of heat without exceeding the maximumjunction temperature for the chip. The TDP is typically not the most power the chip could ever draw (such as by apower virus ), but rather the maximum power that it would draw when running real applications. This ensures the computer will be able to handle all applications without exceeding itsthermal envelope , or requiring a cooling system for the maximum theoretical power, which would cost more and achieve no real benefit.TDP can be defined in different ways by different manufacturers, but in most cases TDP is measured at the geometric center on the topside of the processor integrated heat spreader. For processors without integrated heat spreaders such as mobile processors, the thermal design power is referred to as the junction temperature (Tj).
See also
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CPU power dissipation External links
* [http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page3.html SilentPCReview article on TDP]
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