Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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My guess is that their changes were so drastic that the software didn't keep up.

It's one thing to be running hot all the time, it's an entirely different thing to actually cause damage because of that.

This reminds me of some laptops a few years ago which would overheat just sitting in the BIOS setup screen for too long, because the fans were entirely software-controlled and that hadn't been loaded yet.

I don't think power management should ever be left to software entirely if it can result in situations like this - software can make the CPU go into a lower power state, but the CPU should know when it's too hot and throttle itself without any intervention from software.

Yes, otherwise you end up with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y39D4529FM4 ;)

(I'm well aware it's not a realistic experiment, but it's a fun demonstration nonetheless.)

That video reminds me of childhood, good old Tom's Hardware :)

Those poor CPUs. The first two no-heatsink temperatures are lower than my 2600k's idle temperatures - what's changed?

The Intel CPUs throttled to an absolute minimum state of power draw in order to keep itself from frying. Those chips also came with an integrated heatsink, like modern chips, that provides just enough heat dissipation to keep the CPU from frying itself before it can throttle down.

That video was made because AMD didn't incorporate such protective features back in that era. That's why their chip absolutely fries itself within moments of removing the heatsink. 100W through an area the size of a Tic-Tac (die area dedicated to cache uses almost no power) is a recipe for catastrophic failure if left unchecked.

My old Q6600 could do this to a degree. Sometimes the fan wouldn't spin up on boot, so there was just passive cooling. i'd try playing a game/doing something and performance would start digging it's way to China.

At which point I'd take the side of my PC off, and manually spin the fan until it got the idea.

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