Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

In other words, if you are going to buy a top end Intel part, you should invest in a good cooling solution, or you're going to get the performance of a much lower grade part as it throttles performance.

It is likely that most cooling solutions have some headroom, so Prescott might indeed exceed TDP very often, and would have no problem doing so as long as the temperature was below the throttle limit.

So TDP does not equal max power except in a system with a poor cooling solution. The motherboard has to be designed to be able to supply the maximum current and maximum voltage.

Those tables that were posted are pretty telling. Maybe AMD should start spec-ing with TDP. It is obvious this would be much lower than their current max power spec.