Editing Thermal design power (section)

{{Short description|Amount of heat a computer's cooling system must dissipate}}
{{About|the thermal design envelope of microprocessors|the general concept|power rating}}

[[File:AMD_heatsink_and_fan.jpg | thumb | right | alt=Heatsink made of aluminum fins and core mounted on a motherboard, with an approximately half hand-sized fan attached on the top of it. The aluminum core of the heatsink contacts the 40x40mm CPU surface underneath it, taking heat away through thermal conduction. This heatsink is designed with the cooling capacity matching the CPU’s TDP | Heatsink mounted on a motherboard, cooling the CPU underneath it. This heatsink is designed with the cooling capacity matching the CPU’s TDP.]]
'''Thermal design power''' ('''TDP'''), also known as '''thermal design point''', is the maximum amount of [[heat]] that a computer component (like a [[CPU]], [[GPU]] or [[system on a chip]]) can generate and that its [[computer cooling|cooling system]] is designed to [[dissipation|dissipate]] during normal operation at a non-turbo clock rate (base frequency).

Some sources state that the peak [[power rating]] for a microprocessor is usually 1.5 times the TDP rating.<ref name="HennessyPatterson2012">{{ cite book | author1 = John L. Hennessy |author2 = David A. Patterson | title = Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=v3-1hVwHnHwC&pg=PA22 | year = 2012 | publisher = Elsevier | isbn = 978-0-12-383872-8 | page = 22 | edition = 5th }}</ref>