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Comment by whoomp12342 | Hacker News Reader

how on earth does this not melt all matter in the known universe?

forgive my laymen knowledge, I am just a humble software person but isn't the equation of power -> speed exponential which is why CPU speeds clocked out around 4ghz and we moved to multi core processing? what sorcery exists that lets us suddenly break that barrier?

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Lots and lots and lots of energy. The tdp of my first i7-920 was 95 watts, and rumors are this new Intel chip will clock in almost 3x higher.

This processor's TDP will likely be 125W just like its predecessor and the generation before that and the generation before that, too. It's a practical design point that desktop cases, coolers, and motherboard power circuitry can hit.

Power = Capacitance * Voltage ^2 * frequency ; not exponential

thank you! I just had a simple graph in my head. Now that there is something I can conceptualize, is it :

Power = Capacitance * Voltage ^(2 * frequency)

Power = Capacitance * (Voltage ^2) * frequency

It's

Power = Capacitance * (Voltage ^2) * frequency

The difference in energy stored in a capacitor at two different voltages is 0.5*C*(V^2). A chip will burn that energy 2*(frequency) times per second, so P=C*(V^2)*F.

Edit: forgot a half

The latter. See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_power_dissipation#So...

and

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/33340

In general you can often work out the answers to questions like this by considering units. In this case, we don't need to figure out what Watts / Farads is(1), we can see that Volts^Hz is not going to give us anything well-behaved.

(1)[m^4 kg^2 s^-7 A^-2]

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