TWY, <Now, the very strong implication is that had Intel not provided this throttling mechanism, something very bad (lock up/system crash) might have happened.>
Can the mechanism be manually disabled, or at least adjusted? If that was done, would the Pentium 4 1.7 GHz have crashed running Quake 3? Why is your implication a "strong" one?
<Remember, this was not software specifically designed to tax and crash the processor. This was Quake3. Do you agree with this?? Please answer this specific question.>
Well yeah, I agree, but why are you so eager to get an answer from me on this specific question? Why should Quake 3 or any other compute-intensive application be any less stressful on the processor (or any part of the processor) than a specifically-coded stress test?
<Give me a break. It was clear from the article, that this throttling was seen on more than one system and processor. He also made it clear that the throttling mechanism seemed to vary quite a bit among different systems and processors.>
There were only two confirmed cases of throttling in the article, and one case which even Bert and Van admit cannot be root-caused to throttling. And with all of the time Bert and Van spent on this issue (mostly Van, I believe), you'd think they can successfully duplicate these cases using a wide variety of processors out there. But so far, they've only found a couple of isolated cases.
<Personally, I'd drag Intel in and force them to explain in excruciating detail how and why this throttling takes place.>
I'm sure they're investigating this as we speak. Like I said before, the release of the 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 is on the line here, and surely Intel does NOT need another embarrassing situation on their hands.
Let's wait for more study on the subject before jumping to conclusions here.
Tenchusatsu |
