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Unless I'm mistaken, isn't something like 75% of a CPU's power consumption just in pushing the clock signal around? I just assumed that a faster clock would consume more power (as a general rule).

Wikipedia seems to agree with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation

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Yes a faster clock will do that, but as mentioned by quellhorst, you won't always be running at the fastest speed. There's also another important trick Clock Gating[1] that will reduce the power even more. That's one of the places that Intel has been working on in order to get the power usage down as much as possible to make the CPU have to dissipate less heat too. With a multi-core system it's just about absolutely necessary in order to be able to avoid overheating the die.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_gating

You CPU doesn't have to run at the full GHZ when it isn't in use.

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