It's what they don't tell you about power specs that matter.

Anyone familiar with board-level design has developed an intuitive feel for packaged-processor power specifications: the processor draws a certain amount of power, give or take a percentage based on process variation and speed binning. For a variety of reasons, this intuition utterly fails with respect to vendor specifications for processor core IP. Read our white paper: Processor Core Power Specs: A Cautionary Tale at http://www.tensilica.com/products/literature-docs/white-papers/power-specs/