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AMD And THG update

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the burning-down-the-house dept.

Mhrmnhrm writes "In the interests of responsible journalism, the gang over at Tom's Hardware has developed this article in the interests of setting the record straight about their original AMD burn-out video, and the new release (possibly from AMD) of this past week. It would seem that BOTH videos are correct, and that the question of whether or not somebody is hiding something depends entirely upon your own point of view."

3 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. More on amdzone. P4 by leuk_he · · Score: 4, Informative

    AMD zone also has an update on this story. The most interesting thing (to me) is that they have a 2nd video that show the P4 shuts down. With possible data loss like the modified XP tom was shown in munich.

  2. Re:But in the end by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    But I can't believe they managed to play Quake on a CPU without a heatsink unless the mobo they used was doctored in some way to throttle speed based on the thermal diode reading.

    Actually, with the proper chipset, the thermal diode can be used to throttle the speed. Go look at the AMD 766 register programming manual, section 4.6.1.4 and register C3A50:TTH_EN and C3A50:TTH_RATIO. The southbridge accepts a signal from a chip like the MAX6512 and will throttle the CPU when it asserts. But only if the motherboard has this hardware AND the firmware configures the southbridge to do so

  3. Response time of thermal diode is less than 1ms by De+Lemming · · Score: 3, Informative

    On Ace's Hardware, this subject is discussed thoroughly the last days. An interesting article can be found here. Some thoughts from this article:
    - the component needed for proper protection of the cpu costs $0.85 (in quantities of 1K).
    - "Obviously, Siemens used an external temperature probe and tried to pass it off as using the internal diode."
    - The reaction time of the thermal diode is certainly not 1 degree/second: "At our worst case rise of 300C/sec, that translates to a response time of less than 1ms. No way would this result in a fried CPU if power off is immediate upon the signal occurring."

    For a matter of fact, an engineer told a friend of mine it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to develop a thermal diode with such characteristics (1 degree/sec response time).

    You can find the main thread of this article here.