Power Performance

Thermal Design Power (TDP) is a metric that is expressed in watts. It refers to the amount of power/heat a cooling system (i.e. heatsink, fan) is expected to dissipate to prevent overheating. The TDP does not typically indicate the most power the chip could ever draw, but how much it draws under real load. You can, generally, use TDP to gauge power consumption of a chip, in that the smaller the number for TDP, the lower power consumption by the CPU.

This chart comparing the power versus performance of CPUs is made using thousands of PerformanceTest benchmark results. The chart below compares CPU Power Performance (performance / Max TDP) using the TDP numbers gathered from various sources. Higher results in the chart represent better power vs performance usage. The top 200 CPUs are graphed below.