Recently I was wondering if just like a computer the ti 84 plus CE could generate heat.

The only way to get a CE to generate heat is to puncture the battery

Why does this not work is it something to do with the way the CE processes things?

Edit: because I know that having to many tabs open or doing something computationally expensive (like running a 3d renderer) on a computer can make the CPU start to get warm

All electronics generate some amount of heat, but an unmodified CE running TI-BASIC can do nowhere near enough to generate heat that you could feel.

It does, just not a lot, and the amount it does doesn't change that much. I'd estimate the maximum heat production to be below 0.3 watts, compared to around a hundred watts for a typical laptop.

PCs produce more heat when doing more stuff because they adjust their clock speeds based on CPU load. Low clock rates are slower, but use less power (and therefore produce less heat), while high clock rates are faster but use a lot more power. So, trying to run a bunch of stuff at the same time will cause it to switch to a high clock rate to keep up, which uses more power.

The CE, on the other hand, runs at its full clock rate of 48 MHz at pretty much all times. Even if you ask it to do more stuff, the clock rate won't change, so it won't output more heat.

Did you actually go an puncture the battery only to find that there's no heat? /j

Anyway, the reason that some computers don't generate as much heat as others (yes, your 84+CE is a computer in a way) is that they just don't use as much power.

You see, computer chips generate heat because they are inefficient. That is, the electrical energy they use to "work" almost always ends up as heat. But even on modern high-power computers, that amount of heat is so minuscule that it is very easy to manage; on things like handheld calculators it's largely a non-issue.

If you were to game on your CE for half an hour straight, always keeping the CPU busy with something, then maybe it might get maybe two or three degrees hotter than the ambient environment. But I think something even like the display would generate more heat than that.

In systems like the CE, heat is of literally no concern due to its tiny, tiny power consumption.

Thx for all of the answers to my questions that come up in my mind randomly

Edit: I wonder if changing bytes (Edit:nibbles not bytes) in the archive from 0 to F and back again really fast will generate any noticeable heat

Erasing and writing to flash does use slightly more power than regular operation, but the heat would be coming from the flash chip, not the ASIC, so instead of one slightly-warmer-than-air-temperature component you would have two. In any case, you probably wouldn't be able to tell even if you had taken the back of the calculator off and touched the ASIC and flash chip directly.

It's not possible to change data in flash on a per-nibble level. On the parallel flash, you can clear bits a byte at a time, but in order to set a bit you need to erase the entire 65,536-byte flash sector. The serial flash is similar, but IIRC it supports writing multiple bytes at a time. Hex editors display nibbles rather than bytes for legibility, because it's easier for humans to deal with hexadecimal than a base-256 number system.