Thermal Design Power

With Thermal Design Power (abbreviation: TDP, occasionally wrong also: Thermal Design Point) is in the electronics industry refers to a maximum value for the thermal dissipation of a processor or other electronic components on the basis of the cooling is designed. The TDP is usually greater than the real maximum power dissipation. Depending on the type of processor or component cooling system and the ambient temperature (usually air temperature inside a case ) must be operated some effort to even in exceptional situations ( high ambient temperature and high processor load) dissipate the waste heat can. This results in modern PC systems a conflict of computing power, cost, noise pollution and climate. The TDP has been introduced in order to pre- plan the thermal dimensioning of a system can. In order to determine the TDP load cases are used that occur in typical maximum stress in actual use, such as the encoding of videos.

Application

Manufacturers define the TDP in various ways. Often it corresponds to the maximum possible power loss, so that the cooling must be designed for the appropriate heat. It is calculated uniform procedures are based on the manufacturers of microprocessors, the processor may change from generation to generation processor beyond. Special processes - for example, a burn-in - the called TDP can usually even exceeded.

In modern processors ( since 2004), the TDP is increasingly the focus of chip development. There is a tendency for the optimization of the heat quantities in both the idling operation (idle) as well as at full load. Therefore, they achieve in practice rarely the TDP since its clock frequency with the current computational requirements is regulated and thus a much lower average, the Average CPU Power shows. Examples of such technologies are PowerNow!, Enhanced PowerNow! and Cool'n'Quiet from AMD and Intel SpeedStep technology.

The increased attention to the TDP this is, however, also increasingly a marketing tool for the manufacturer. So are eg Nvidia for the graphics card Geforce 8800 Ultra a lower TDP than a Geforce 8800 GTX, although on the 8800 Ultra is the same GPU with a higher voltage and higher clock rates is used, and - in a review of the power - as expected a higher value provided. The lower specification than the 8800 GTX was possible because we had this been an unnecessarily high TDP.