this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The lower power 486s didn't even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.
It's kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
My Pentium 100 even says "Heatsink req'd"
It really isn't. Modern mobile cpus barely sip power.
PL2 on a 14900T is 106W
Edit: I'm an idiot, T series is low power socketed, not mobile. 14900HX has a TDP of 55W but boosts short term to 157W, which is still pretty ridiculous
My 11950H (and all other “full power” Intel mobile CPUs) have a PL1 of >100 watts (109 for mine), and mine a PL2 of 139 watts. This laptop is about an inch thick.
Nothing about this laptop sips power, I’ve gotten as bad as 30 minutes of battery life out of a 90 watt hour battery not playing games.
If you meant cell phones and tablets, that's mostly due to the different architecture. RISC processors are super energy efficient, which also makes them much cooler to run.
x86-64 is a CISC architecture, which tends to be much more power hungry. There are only a couple of very low power Celeron CPUs that work under 10W of TDP, while that's very common among phones' CPUs.
In many cases it's actually RISC under the hood and uses an interpreter to translate the CISC commands and run them in the most optimal manner on the silicon
ARM and RISC-V absolutely scale up to multi-hundred watt server CPUs quite easily. Just look at the Ampere systems you can rent from various VPSes for example
The big benefit that ARM and RISC-V have is they have no established backwards compatibility to keep carrying technical debt forwards. ARM versions their instruction sets and software has to be released for given versions of ARM cores, and RISC-V is simply too new to have any significant technical debt on the instruction set side.
Atom cores were notable for focusing the architecture on some instructions then other instructions would be a slog to execute, so they were really good at certain things and for desktop use (especially in the extremely budget machines they got shoved into) they were painful. Much like how eCores are now. They're very carefully architected for power efficiency, and do their jobs extremely well, but an all eCore CPU is a slog for desktop use in many cases