There's been a lot of misinformation spread about what TDP means for modern CPUs. In Intel's case TDP is the steady state power consumption of the CPU in its de

There's been a lot of misinformation spread about what TDP means for modern CPUs. In Intel's case TDP is the steady state power consumption of the CPU in its default configuration while executing a long running workload. Long meaning more than a minute or two. The CPU implements this by keeping an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) of the CPU's power consumption. The CPU will modulate its frequency to keep this moving average at-or-below the TDP. One consequence of using a moving average is that if the CPU has been idle for a long time then starts running a high power workload instantaneous power consumption can momentarily exceed the TDP while the average catches up. This is often misleadingly referred to as "turbo mode" by hardware review sites. It's not a mode, there's no state machine at work here, it's just a natural result of using a moving average. The use of EWMA is meant to model the heat capacity of the cooling solution. When the CPU has been idle for a while and the heatsink is cool, the CPU can afford to use more power while the heatsink warms up. Another factor which confuses things is motherboard firmware disabling power limits without the user's knowledge. Motherboards marketed to enthusiasts often do this to make the boards look better in review benchmarks. This is where a lot of the "Intel is lying" comes from, but it's really the motherboard manufacturers being underhanded. The situation on the AMD side is of course a bit different. AMD's power and frequency scaling is both more complex and much less documented than Intel's so it's hard to say exactly what the CPU is doing. What is known is that none of the actual power limits programmed into the CPU align with the TDP listed in the spec. In practice the steady state power consumption of AMD CPUs under load is typically about 1.35x the TDP. Unlike Intel, firmware for AMD motherboards does not mess with the CPU's power limit settings unless the user does so explicitly. Presumably this is because AMD's CPU warranty is voided by changing those settings, while Intel's is not.