[vel0city]

Its pretty insane to see someone say something like: “TDP is about thermal watts, not electrical watts. These are not the same.” Watts are watts.

But yeah, TDP means nothing. If you stick plenty of cooling and run the right motherboard board revision your "TDP" can be whatever you want it to be until the thing melts.

[o11c]

"TDP is about average watts, not peak watts" would be an honest way of saying it.

[vel0city]

But in the end that's still not actually true in many modern desktop chips. You can take a 65W part, and with a "stock" motherboard firmware, good cooling, and the right workload end up averaging way more than 65W. Or if you have it in a hot room it just might end up using less than 65W.

TDP is more of a rough idea of how much power the manufacturer wanted to classify the part as. It ultimately only loosely relates to the actual heat or electrical usage in practice.