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To: Bill Jackson who wrote (51770)	8/20/2001 5:36:57 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Bill, Re: "Power is equal to the voltage times the current, that's it." Duh. If you paid attention to what I was saying, you'd find that I wasn't arguing the validity of that most primary of engineering equations. Instead, I was trying to say the following: imagine running various applications under a given CPU. If you had some way to measure the number of transistors that are sourcing enough current to switch at any one time (ignoring leakage current for the time being), that number is not going to be fixed relative to time. Therefore, measuring power dissipation as a function of current times voltage is an exercise in futility because the current will be changing as a function of time. On the other hand, if you want to be able to provide a reliable power level, then you have a point that the maximum specified current level should be the one that is designed around. However, we were talking about cooling solutions. My point is that the cooling solution for a Pentium 4 should be designed around the Thermal Design Points that Intel has listed in their datasheets. Others argued about those levels being unreliable due to current and voltage measurements. For calculating maximum power draw under rare instances where the largest number of transistors can consistently be switching at one time (actually, this is probably nearly impossible to achieve, since maximum power is purely theoretical), then current can be used. But current is meaningless when you are designing a system around the upper bound for the power dissipated by running today's applications. See the difference? wanna_bmw