Coding Horror

Today’s processors contain billions of heat-generating transistors in an ever shrinking space. The power budget might go from:

1000 watts on a specialized server 100 watts on desktops 30 watts on laptops 5 watts on tablets 1 or 2 watts on a phone 100 milliwatts on an embedded system

That’s three four orders of magnitude. Modern CPU design is the delicate art of placing an inferno on the head of a pin.

Look at the original 1993 Pentium compared to the 20th anniversary Pentium:

1993
Pentium
66 Mhz
16kb L1
3.2 million transistors
2014
Pentium G3258
3.2 Ghz × 2 cores
128kb L1, 512kb L2, 3MB L3
1.4 billion transistors

I remember cooling the early CPUs with simple heatsinks; no fan. Those days are long gone.

A roomy desktop computer affords cooling opportunities (and thus a watt budget) that a laptop or tablet could only dream of. How often will you be at peak load? For

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