Quote:
Originally Posted by Weer
Ever since C2D came out three years ago, I've been hearing nothing but rants about the thermal envelope. They said 45nm would fix it, now they're saying that i7 has heat issues too. The reason Netburst overheated was exactly because of the shrinkage in die. The pipes were too small and they leaked. The tri-pipe design and indeed the architecture is what counts. CPU's are always going to have 'heat issues'.
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I went into detail about this previously. Basically, the TDP is limited to about 130w because Intel doesn't want to put more money into heatsinks. There's only so many transistors one can fit on a chip before they hit the maximum of the heatsink.
Nehalem can hit 85C on the stock HSF (it starts cutting back speed/voltage at 100C). Core i5 and most likely, Core i3 will have more total transistors because of their MCM northbridge on-die (I think the northbridge is also 65nm rather than 45nm). This means that in order for Intel to make it all fit and still beat Core 2 Quad, they have to shrink the die.
I couldn't find any power specs on X58 chipset. I'd imagine it is lower than those from Core 2 just because it is one chip instead of two.