No... it's not 15W. 1.8GHz is why they call it 15W, but as long as the CPU get a chance to boost higher than that, the wattage is going to skyrocket. I don't understand why we can't just get more realistic numbers (especially from Intel...). When it comes to mobile, wattage is more important than performance, otherwise I'd just get a desktop CPU.

It looks more impressive to stick the stock wattage in the presentation I suppose. Marketing and all that instead of 15w and up or just actually typing out the typical load power draw or wattage under normal non stress-test conditions but as far as I know both Intel and AMD has variants of how they specify CPU voltage and average power draw or just near idle wattage consumption and none of it is generally the boost speed even if the CPU spends most of it's time around this instead of the stock speeds. (Can still do various power saving modes and operations to lower consumption but typical operating values will differ.) And then reviewers have to go and test the CPU in various conditions and get the actual value unless it's written out somewhere else in very small text or something. 😀 EDIT: Not bad though. I mean the default listed wattage is what 65w or something I think for a current-gen Ryzen7 CPU model. 3700X octa core specifically and then that base speed would be 3.6 Ghz now halved to 1.8 here. Suppose the power draw and curve is pretty efficient when scaled down further if they can keep around 15 - 20w at that speed. 🙂 Although it can still boost and then we'll see what that gets and how AMD is controlling this CPU model for what it gets without any bios adjustments or further overclock changes. (Average clocks and then the higher shorter periods of bursts which I assume is where it can then hit the 4 Ghz speeds.)

schmidtbag:

No... it's not 15W. 1.8GHz is why they call it 15W, but as long as the CPU get a chance to boost higher than that, the wattage is going to skyrocket. I don't understand why we can't just get more realistic numbers (especially from Intel...). When it comes to mobile, wattage is more important than performance, otherwise I'd just get a desktop CPU.

I don't mind if its TDP. The TDP rating seems to be working fine as laptops are getting cooled properly. What I would like to see is another stat that represents actual power draw just for transparency sake. Once you get into desktop chips the TDP's start to become almost meaningless.

JamesSneed:

I don't mind if its TDP. The TDP rating seems to be working fine as laptops are getting cooled properly. What I would like to see is another stat that represents actual power draw just for transparency sake. Once you get into desktop chips the TDP's start to become almost meaningless.

Well even for cooling purposes it is misleading, since 4.3GHz isn't sustainable for very long. But yes, actual power draw would be much appreciated too.

the only realistic power figures are the coolers since they use a hot plate with static 100% accurate (voltage x current) Watts if you still care about TDP please check gamer nexus article and video [youtube=tL1F-qliSUk] my point of view intel has lower idle power thanks to it's better idle management amd has lower 100% cpu usage power thx to it's advanced tech amd has a huge margin to enhance their idle which is crap currently (maybe that's what this 1.7->4.3 is meant to improve) intel can't hardly do something to reduce their max power, very curious about the trickery they seem to have attempted in the 10'xxx series

Is this not the 4900U or whatever that chip was that's yet to release for the mobile line yet, to tackle intel's top-end back into the trash-heap where intel belongs?

schmidtbag:

Well even for cooling purposes it is misleading, since 4.3GHz isn't sustainable for very long. But yes, actual power draw would be much appreciated too.

I meant engineers don't seem to be failing at making proper cooling solutions.

My 2600X is listed @ 95w but if you look at the average over time then the actual figure is only 22w but only if you fix the stupid Ryzen Power Plan from 90% always on down to 5% and use the PC 80% of it's usage isn't gaming but just browsing and watching movies an stuff. So maybe it's an average usage scenario over time. Must be that because no way is it using 15w while boosting past 4gigs.

JamesSneed:

I meant engineers don't seem to be failing at making proper cooling solutions.

Cooling is only 1/3 of the problem. Keep in mind too that people who buy a CPU like this aren't depending on burst performance; they're intending to do heavy workloads. Battery life and getting the performance you paid for are more important. 15W for a max TDP is great - that's the kind of power consumption that will last you for hours with predictable performance. But I wouldn't be surprised if this CPU exceeds 65W. The cooling solution obviously will prevent it from using that much power for very long (especially if the heatsink is rated for a 15W TDP), so you're paying for performance you won't get often. The entire reason you'd buy a CPU like this over a lower-clocked variant is so you can get tasks done quicker, but you're not saving that much time if it keeps throttling performance. If you buy more accessories to keep your laptop cooler, then you are defeating the portability of it. Also remember that efficiency doesn't scale linearly with clock speed. So even if you're able to do 10 minutes of work in less than 5 minutes, you could be using up more than 10 minutes of power. This is especially true in a laptop, where the fan would have to work disproportionately harder than it would on a lower-clocked model. What's the point of having a higher clock speed if you could be limiting your total performance? Of course, the key word here is "could". It's possible that this isn't significantly more inefficient, especially if the cooling solution prevents you reaching inefficient clock speeds.

Doesn't seem very extreme to me.