Elmer, we're talking about 2 'sorts' of things here.
1) the usual claims of CPU crashes, instability, etc, that from time to time plague both AMD and Intel, and sometimes require product recalls, or voltage or thermal solution tweaks. [Edit: and more often turn out to be false. For both companies.]
2) A special cicuit designed to allow OEMs to use cheap thermal solutions while still selling to the consumer at a a claim of 'X GHz', which they will not actually be able to achieve all the time. Furthermore, even with good thermal solutions, this circuit may still activate and degrade performance.
We've been focusing on the latter half of #2, but isn't the former enough to make you think "what a sleazy trick". OEMs can claim they're selling a 1.7GHz CPU knowing full well the throttle will kick in due to their cheap(er) thermal solution. And this is not being disputed, as far as I know, since Intel actually says that it is precisely their intention to enable this sort of thing.
Doug |
