I’m confused. I did some research online, and learned that cpu’s can essentially double has a hotplate, because 99-100% of electricity consumed is turned into heat. how? doesn’t the cpu use energy to make calcuations and render things? I’m real confused.
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>doesn’t the cpu use energy to make calculations and render things?
Yes.
But you know the law of conservation of energy, the one that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed? That means whatever electrical energy you put into the CPU *must* be turned into some other form of energy.
When you’re talking about the CPU “using” energy to perform calculations, in a *physical* sense, what is it actually doing? The answer is, not much. It’s not turning electrical energy into kinetic energy, the way a car would. It’s not performing work on itself, such as lifting itself onto a higher shelf. It’s not even using the energy to drive airflow to cool itself – that’s the job of the fans, not the CPU. Instead, all of the “physical” aspects of what it’s actually doing is just sending out electrical signals to various parts on the motherboard, which barely uses *any* electrical energy.
As per the law of conservation of energy, the remainder of the energy supplied to the CPU, which is to say, practically all of it, must be converted into a different form. That different form is heat, which the CPU converts it into through various leakage currents and resistive losses and other internal losses.
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