Fan on full speed, with thunderbolt display connected

Hi,
I have a brand new late 2011 15" mb pro. All standard, besides a SSD disk. I also bought a thunderbolt dispay, and it works great. The only thing is that the macbook fan start going on full speed in a few minutes, and will keep doing even if I don't run any programs at all.
Does it really consume so much power to run this thunderbolt display that the macbook needs to be at maximum all the time?
When I disconnect the macbook and run it stand alone, I don't have this problem.

You may likely have some other problem. Do this to start:
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu.  Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

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