> What would be the purpose? If you want to purposefully limit power you're forcing the chip to underperform The rationale is that each architecture has a swee

> What would be the purpose? If you want to purposefully limit power you're forcing the chip to underperform The rationale is that each architecture has a sweet spot consumption/performance, and increasing performance over a certain threshold has increasing costs (AFAIK, one significant factor is the increase of voltage in order to push frequencies higher). I don't know the numbers, but AMD has been offering the 65W threshold for a while, so it can be reasonably assumed that 65W is the sweet spot performance/consumption. The reason for not buying directly a cheaper model is the number of cores - one may choose, say, a 65W-throttled CPU with 16 cores over an unthrottled 8-cores (in some scenarios, this can make sense).