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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (135463)	5/18/2001 7:06:29 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

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

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (135463)	5/18/2001 8:06:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

I think the point is, (according to his tests) the P4 did throttle indicating an active throttling mechanism. Now, the very strong implication is that had Intel not provided this throttling mechanism, something very bad (lock up/system crash) might have happened. In that sense throttleing is good. Its much better to run a bit slower then to lock up or crash or even damage the chip. Its not the throttleing down that would be such a problem its that it is needed. It should be very rare in any non-overclocked decently cooled system. If it is not then Intel is rating the clock speed of its chips too high. If it is very rare then the throttleing is just an extra safety mechanism. Even if it is rare it might indicate that the P4 on .18 won't scale as well as many people thought it would. Tim