Well, power consumption is a simple matter of Ohm's law. More transistors need more power, voltage regulators waste power - producing heat etc. It's not (and never was) that someone says: let's build a PC that consumes 400 Watt or something.

derSammler wrote:

Well, power consumption is a simple matter of Ohm's law. More transistors need more power, voltage regulators waste power - producing heat etc. It's not (and never was) that someone says: let's build a PC that consumes 400 Watt or something.

Thank.
But core size is a choice that can be done. Obviously I imagine bigger core size, more transistor, much less core numbers in a silicon so much more expensive. That's probably the limit I wasn't thinking about.

386SX wrote:

My point if "what if" older console and computer were built to consume 1000W or 150W as console just adding dissipations that wasn't usually used back then? Up to any technical core limits I mean.Didn't they do it cause they could not or cause no one would have bought a 250W console or a 500W pc?

If we take like a 486 and give it a voltage and clock rate so it sucks power like a Prescott it:

a.) Burn in a fraction of a second
b.) Let's say we solve its cooling and it can take the voltage - then we'd have a little faster 486. I'm no expert but I know that designs don't scale linearly with voltage. Actually they scale progressively bad so I don't think you'd get more than like a 486DX4-200. Perhaps a bit better if you started with a very lucky Am5x86 that can do that 200MHz at 5 Volts.

c.) Okay, let's pile up cores then, just regular, non-overclocked cores. Say you have a thirty-core 486. Then you'll need software that takes real advantage of that many cores and they're not very common even today. Back in those times typical applications used strictly one thread, so, one single core.

Manufacturing processes needed to improve and provide space and transistors (within a reasonable die size, because too large cores are insanely expensive to make because yields plummet and you'll end up with a handful of chips from an entire wafer) for today's much more complex designs. Said 486 contained like 1.2 million transistors. One single core today consists of hundreds of millions if not more. This is the price of their higher efficiency both at running software and saving power - even though it isn't obvious for the first glance as they consume a lot more power than their predecessors. But they are immensely more efficient than a huge pile of 486s that give the same computing power under real world conditions.