Why does the heat production increase as the clockrate of a CPU increases?

Posted by Nils on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Nils
Published on 2010-07-14T12:59:49Z Indexed on 2011/01/06 15:55 UTC
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Hardware

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physics

This is probably a bit off-topic, but the whole multi-core debate got me thinking.

It's much easier to produce two cores (in one package) then speeding up one core by a factor of two. Why exactly is this? I googled a bit, but found mostly very imprecise answers from over clocking boards which do not explain the underlying Physics.

The voltage seems to have the most impact (quadratic), but do I need to run a CPU at higher voltage if I want a faster clock rate? Also I like to know why exactly (and how much) heat a semiconductor circuit produces when it runs at a certain clock speed.

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