Intel's TDP numbers are at best an indicator of which product segment a chip falls into. They are wildly inaccurate and unreliable indicators of power draw unde

Intel's TDP numbers are at best an indicator of which product segment a chip falls into. They are wildly inaccurate and unreliable indicators of power draw under any circumstance. For example, here's a "58W" TDP Celeron that can't seem to get above 20W: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1345656830907789312 https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1345656830907789312 And on the flip side, if you're building a desktop PC with a more high-end Intel processor, you will usually have to change a lot of motherboard firmware settings to get the behavior to resemble Intel's own recommendations that their TDP numbers are supposedly based on. Without those changes, lots of consumer retail motherboards default to having most or all of the power limits effectively disabled. So out of the box, a "65W" i7-10700 and a "125W" i7-10700K will both hit 190-200W when all 8 cores/16 threads are loaded. If a metric can in practice be off by a factor of three in either direction, it's really quite useless and should not be quantified with a scientific unit like Watts.