i think people use watts because it's turns out to be the same thing.

a 60 watt lightbulb generates an amount of heat based on the efficiency of the transfer of electricity -> light.

A cpu is using it's energy to order electons, but most of the energy just ends up as heat eventually on or near the CPU. So the conversion from the energy it uses to the heat it produces is roughly 1:1.

So people tend to just use watts to describe how much energy a CPU puts out because otherwise it'd be confusing for all the morons out there. (Yes, they should probably use joules).

fb