Why wouldn't it be? There's no "work" being done by the processor in a mechanical sense, it's essentially just a giant resistor dumping all its energy to heat,

Why wouldn't it be? There's no "work" being done by the processor in a mechanical sense, it's essentially just a giant resistor dumping all its energy to heat, in a useful way. As much as the guy was beloved by the community, Robert Hallock of AMD had a tendency to say some shit at times, and one of the worst was his "electrical watts are not thermal watts" spiel. Yeah, they kinda are, and if you they aren't then the FCC would like to talk to you about your spurious emissions. And if your magic formula doesn't match the observed characteristics of the chip... one of the terms in your formula is wrong, or the formula itself is wrong. It was a super lame justification for something that truly was as simple as "boost TDP", but, at that time Intel desktop TDPs actually did cover boost already (5960X, 7700K, etc would sustain boost within TDP on a worst-case load like prime95) and AMD were kinda downplaying the fact that they gave themselves a "cheat" factor on Ryzen TDPs for marketing purposes by calling it PPT instead. He did a huge disservice to public education there by spreading what I'd say were outright lies. Like it shouldn't be a surprise that ~100% of CPU power is turned into heat, but, we had the technical marketing director of one of the major CPU companies saying that it wasn't.