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Comment by neverrroot | Hacker News Reader

A pity the TDP went up a lot, but in order to compete with Intel, they likely had to do that.

They are covering both ends of the power envelope, with greatly increased efficiency (they claim up to 74% improved efficiency at 65W TDP), but also increasing the overall TDP to allow higher multi-core clock speeds and, obviously, higher single-core clock speeds.

I'm confused by this image on this point too: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17552/Ryzen%207000%20Tech%...

Is the intention that some will cap the voltage at the wall?

You can limit the maximum boost clocks to reduce power draw and thermal dissipation. Some have reported that they have set this in the motherboard settings.

At any rate, this demonstrates how much more efficient the Zen 4 cores at lower power when compared to Zen 3. If you need high clock speed across cores, you won't gain as much of the efficiency, but the potential here for laptops based on Zen 4 is extremely promising. In those cases, chips are often configured for a maximum TDP between 15W and 65W depending on use case (though some high end workstations and gaming machines are set even higher.)

Not at the wall, but I'm sure some folks will limit the TDP in BIOS/UEFI to lower noise/temperature/power draw.

I also expect some vendors to sell smaller computers that force the CPU to lower TDP due to insufficient cooling.

But, I expect the main reason for that slide is to draw attention away from the huge TDP increase.

AMD allows the user to set the TDP for their CPU. The branding they use for this is "Configurable TDP" or "cTDP". You can set it in your bios, or possibly using some AMD-specific cpu tuning program directly from windows.

They’re showing the performance difference at different points along the power curve, since it’s non linear.

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