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Comment by IanChiles | Hacker News Reader

I seem to recall reading that these processors would have a 220W TDP - which makes the whole 5ghz thing much much less impressive...

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I'm yet to find an actual source for that figure whenever it comes up. Is it just some tech site comment section spitballing or did they actually disclose the TDP?

If there's a dimensioned pix of the heatsink, a bored enough engineer could calculate the theoretical degC/W rating of the heatsink, and given a presumably constant deltaT, there's your wattage.

Doesn't have to be dimensioned that accurately. To a first approximation a 1% error in surface area would be about a 1% error in TDP.

I'd like to see very high temp CPU technology. That would be an interesting, challenging direction for hardware tech to move. A tiny lightweight 5 deg C/W heatsink is plenty if you're allowed to run at, say, vacuum tube redhot glow temperatures. I'm well aware of the solid state physics challenges of this, that's why I think it would be very interesting to see if anyone could pull it off.

I doubt that a heatsink on an engineering-sample test board would be sized within a 1% margin. Seems more likely they'd be error generously on the side of big.

Neither - the 5GHz chips were rumored for a while, and the rumors always mentioned 220W TDP.

Since the first half of the rumor came true, it's fairly likely the second half will too.

Agreed, I don't know how you are going to cool that thing quietly or cheaply. I think the thermal load would be less on two cpu chips running at 2/3-rds the GHz. It might be cheaper to build as well.

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