I have a very hard time understanding what TDP is and its importance. Why is heat measured in Watts here? Thanks!
In: Technology
TDP or Thermal Design Power is a measure of what a given computer component is going to output in heat under a given load (usually a figure is the maximum load at regular clock speeds).
Its also a useful proxy for its power consumption, because its not like the component is losing energy in some other way like moving a physical thing, as emitted light or storing it into chemical bonds.
> Why is heat measured in Watts here?
A Watt is a measure of power, a physics concept of expending energy over time (1 Watt = 1 Joule per second). Your muscles expend energy to make kinetic motion, your lights expend energy to make light, all this can be expressed in watts. In this context, electronics are basically small electric heaters, they expend energy to create heat.
So heat isn’t being measured in Watts, its energy expenditure over time is, that energy just happens to be spent as only heat.
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