I'm trying to understand what blattimwind is saying here, but this might be a case where deep understanding has suffered from a badly worded post. Just guessin

I'm trying to understand what blattimwind is saying here, but this might be a case where deep understanding has suffered from a badly worded post. Just guessing here, by pulling apart what little is in there: * Total power usage has a big fixed parts, e.g. screen power usage going up linear with brightness and screen size. Or RAM power usage goes up linearly per bit just to keep the memory intact. So Let's assume OP talks about only the 'clocked' components, like CPUs and busses. * I did hear for single core CPUs how the power usage arose with the square of the CPU speed, unless offset by die shrinking or technological advances. This was one of nature's walls hit by the Pentium IV. Can't find a good reference atm, but here http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3025075/higher-clock-speed-higher-load-power-consumption.html http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3025075/higher-cloc... is a page with the first graph looking square-ish being what happens with power usage when clock goes up on the same machine. * And throughput is linear with clock speed, if nothing else changes. If you double your clock, you double your throughput just by moving more data over the same bus. So the third line of OP is consistent with this: 1/5 of the throughput is reachable with 1/5th of the clock, thus 1/25 of the power. * First line might compare 2 ways to raise the throughput: Either rise the speed of 1 core or add more cores. When you rise the speed of 1 core, power goes with the square of this rise. When you add more cores, power goes linear with these cores, assuming your interconnect is free. * Second line 'between square and m^n' needs some interpreting. It might make sense when for a square n=2, and m measures frequency/throughput/core count/... . I assume he says the real relation might be power usage = throughput^2.3 for example * When you have m cores, and each is interconnected to its m-1 brothers, you have m*(m-1) interconnect elements using power. This is again a square law. You can get around this by not connecting everything to everything, but this will cost you in data throughput - There will be bottlenecks. Thats what i can make from it.