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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (67373)	1/8/2002 1:20:33 PM
From: eCo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Ed Stroglio also made an interesting Northwood observation: A Little History If you're a little agog at my dismissing a 500Mhz/25% [Northwood] overclock so easily and quickly; a 25% overclock is actually on the low side when it comes to the lowest-rated Intel processor after a die shrink. 33% is usually more like it. overclockers.com I would sure be worried if I were an Intel investor, not to mention OEM partner. eCo

To: Ali Chen who wrote (67373)	1/9/2002 12:15:53 AM
From: heatsinker2	Respond to of 275872

Ali- AFAIK, the unconditional throttling kicks in if the chip temperature exceeds 90 (or 120?) degrees C, and the set point is not programmable. So there must be some disconnect in operations, between 69C and 90C: the chip become non-operational before the thermal protection is engaged. [there is a S/W-level of thermal throttling, but it is slightly different story]. I did some more reading. Intel is providing two types at thermal throttling. One is the "save the chip" mode which kicks in at Tj = 135C. You can't turn off this protection. Then there is the more common thermal throttling which is designed to keep the part "within specification". This is based on the junction (die) temperature. This kicks in at some temperature above Tcase = 68/69C. We are never told the Tj where the "within specification" throttling occurs. It sure seems like Intel is doing things the hard way. Why tell the designer to use the hard-to-measure Tcase, when it would be so much simpler to design based on the Tj provided by the thermal diode? Also, Intel is setting a lower limit for operating temperature, +5C, which is also unusual for CPUs. Yeah, seems to be an indication of a marginal design. If you're designing an automotive PC, it means you will have to use a heater to warm up the PC on cold days. Ugh. This is also one of the disadvantages of getting performance from super high frequencies. The higher the frequency, the greater the likelihood of these kinds of issues.