TDP: From Design Guide to Marketing Hype
The actual power draw of the CPU became a design specification called TDP and depending on whose numbers were posted, it stood for typical design power or thermal design power. Semantics aside, in the single core processor environment dominating at the time the TDP was usually considered the absolute maximum power consumption that any CPU could face under worst case scenario conditions. Suffice it to say that in an overhwelming amount of cases, it was not possible to even get close to these numbers using commercially available software. In short, the two reasons why a TDP rating was created in the first place were the tendencies to cut corners on the motherboard (remember those dreadful single-phase VRMs used by MSI on a number of boards?) as well as with respect to OEM heatsink solutions. In other words, as soon as there was a standard, the entire infrastructure could be tested and approved against this standard, with the major benefit of improved motherboard and heatsink designs in the PC space.
The big change came with the increased awareness of global warming. Suddenly, what was originally conceived to force third party manufacturers to have some headroom in their design became a negative attribute. In short, the standard grain of wisdom did not differentiate between a maximum power consumption under worst case conditions and the typical power consumption. Hence a CPU that was labeled with a high TDP , many times to force the enthusiast segment motherboard manufacturer to have the overhead necessary for even some insane overclocking, was labeled as a power hog, even if under normal operating conditions a power consumption even close to the TDP could never be reached. At this point, TDP became a marketing tool; the lower the better.
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