Wbmw:
In this case you are plain flat wrong. There are four items in that PDF on Opteron thermal power. The common one is the 42C ambient used in the testing. The next is used based on the thermal profile used which is simply the thermal resistance (ie. 0.25W/C). The third item is the Tcontrol temperature which is the maximum allowed Tcase temperature no matter the cooling solution used. Max Tcase is the one item that is unique to each CPU packaged. It tells the maximum Tcase that will be seen on that particular CPU using the HSF with the given thermal resistance and ambient of the specified thermal profile. Yes, it is simple to work up the TDPmax for that particular CPU (just reverse the equation and plug in the known numbers).
This goes a few steps farther than Intel on giving people information on their CPU(s). Intel gives some typical power use for all its CPUs in a clock, VID and model bin. AMD will give you the maximum power used by this one particular CPU in the worst case conditions (outside of Tcase and VID). This is much tighter than the bounds supplied by Intel.
So if you want low power, get a CPU with a low Max Tcase. For those who overclock, they seem to want high Max Tcase (given their posts). The thinking is that those CPUs leak more showing the transistors probably have higher max frequency and thus can overclock higher than those with low Max Tcase, lower leakage and thus, lower max frequency. I think there are too many variables to make any of those claims given just VID and Max Tcase (at least without obtaining a much larger and/or more rigorously obtained sample set).
Pete
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