AMD And THG update

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."

Comments

test with fan failure, not heatsink falloff

[doughnuthole]

It is much more likely for a fan to die on the heatsink, than for the heatsink to fall off on its own. Someone should do a test to see if this also causes chip failure or if the sensors on the motherboard can shut down the computer before anything is damaged. The results would mean a lot more to actual users.

But in the end

[baptiste]

the important thing is that publicity of Tom's article got AMD off their butts to try and resolve the problem. Yes, this won't help folks with existing motherboards and I doubt we'll see the new Maxim chips on motherboards for a little while (since many aren't even reading the thermal diode yet) I think its great that Tom's HW pushed AMD in the right direction. So we can debate about who did what, conspiracy, etc but its pointless. Obviously THW blew up Athlons in less than a second. Obviously someone (possibly AMD, who knows0 had one running without a heatsink. Personally I think the 2nd video is fake in some way. I'm an AMD/Athlon fanatic - love them. 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.

But in the end - its really not an issue. Yes, existing Athlon owners are at a SLIGHT risk of failure if their heatsinks fall off (I'd love to see REAL stats on how often THAT happens) But in the end, its still cheaper to replace your Athlon once than to go with an equivalent Pentium 4. So lets be glad AMD listened to the folks at Tom's Hardware - realized they were getting a black eye, and did something about it. Hopefully in a few months we can buy mobos with the Maxim chip safty valve or some tryp of clock throttler. Then the Pentium freaks will have to argue over real stuff like benchmarks and performance instead of making snide comments about Athlons burning you house down.

Re:But in the end

[ahertz]

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.

Just to clarify, maybe you should take a look at the video again. (You did watch the video before posting, right? :b ) Despite what the blurb on the previous article would have you believe, the didn't play quake on a CPU without a heatsink. Without a heat sink, the system immediately shut down. They managed to play Quake for nine minutes on a system with the heat sink fan disabled.

More believeable, isn't it? Admittedly, I don't know enough about the subject to judge whether the video is fake or not, but it's not as wildly unbelieveable as all that.

and in the end it doesn't really matter

[hattig]

Basically, the XP in combination with all currently available motherboards will kill itself if a disaster happens (the heatsink falling off of a CPU happens very rarely). AMD responded and designed a circuit so that the CPU will shut itself down if it gets too hot, causing data loss. In this rare case, data loss isn't an issue.

In the more common case of the CPU fan failing, the CPU will heat up more slowly. Hence the other protection mechanisms in the CPU will be used, and the user will get a chance to save their data.

However, AMD should have designed the safety circuit they have shown off in the article INTO the actual CPU itself, so it can save itself. And it should save itself by basically clocking itself down to 100MHz or slower, so that data loss does not occur and the user can save their data. Hopefully this will be implemented in a future revision of the CPU.

However, the instances of CPU heatsinks falling off are extremely rare, and probably attributable to either a poor initial fitting of the heatsink, or a bad socket with a weakened retention mechanism. In a tower case, the heatsink would probably fall onto the graphics card or spring onto the memory and damage these anyway...

Re:and in the end it doesn't really matter

[jhoffoss]

Something like this will be crucial if AMD ever hopes to break into the server and workstation market in a big way...If a company is going to run a db server, they're not going to use AMD for reasons like the heat protection that will be back-patched on new mobos. A company needs the data to be there whether the cpu is gonna fry or not. Granted, frying the cpu is worse than losing a db, but not by much (either way, you may have to go to the tapes...)

On the other hand, if this company chooses an intel system, they know (as illustrated by Tom's video) that the system will survive, though performance will die. But the integrity of the data remains.

This, as far as I can see, is one of the main things keeping AMD processors out of higher end systems. Even though the piii/p4 performs better in some areas, a person can put a dual athlon board on the desk for around the same cost, which would more than make up for it.

Re:and in the end it doesn't really matter

[hattig]

Yes, but there is another video conflicting with THG's "P4 graceful slowdown" video. In the new video (linked elsewhere on this page), the P4 turns off.

So, in the end, your computer's reliability depends only a little bit on the CPU's reliability, which in turn depends only a little bit on the reliability of the heatsink retaining mechanism. The motherboard, BIOS, and everything else counts as well. Which is pretty obvious. Sure, I can accept that THG burnt up an AMD CPU by using a motherboard that didn't support the new thermal diode, but their subsequent investigations (didn't ask AMD for a start) left a lot to be desired, and now it appears their P4 video isn't a sure fact either...

Re:Quick Summary

[darkonc]

SO the good news is that AMD is now specifying a crude thermal protection for boards using their CPUs. The bad news is that

• This protection doesn't exist for old (current) boards
• It just shuts down the whole system (i.e. crash)
• AMD didn't bother to mention that this is a patched board that they're using.

You could probably do a board design that, instead of shutting down the whole machine, switched it to 100MZ (or some other 'safe' clock speed), but AMD hasn't quite gotten around to that, (yet).

Re:better than a shutdown

[mgv]

I'm sure a 1.5GHz cpu could function at a low temp if reset to a 66mhz bus (or even 33) and lower multiplier, just enough power to save any data and exit gracefully.

You wouldn't need to throttle back that much at all, and I suspect that there would be little need to throttle back the motherboard bus speed.

You would definately want to throttle back the multiplier to slow down the CPU. This would be more efficient as you would reduce memory bottlenecks at the slower CPU speeds.

Probably equally important, you would need to reduce the voltage to the CPU - as CMOS gets higher performance with higher voltages but at the cost of higher wattage.

Probably just dropping the speeds back to a few hundred MHz would suffice - certainly many CPU's of that ilk don't have fans, just heatsinks (and smaller ones than the current AMD's do at that)

My 1c worth (After allowing for the Aus/US exchange rate)

Michael

I still think it's not quite AMD's fault

[Strepsil]

OK, I suppose I want to see AMD as the good guys here, since I love their products. Even so - I can see how things could spin a little more in their favour if you're inclined to be generous.

Firstly, let me say that I belive that thermal protection integrated into the CPU, like to P4 has, would have been the best way to go - but then we'd all be complaining about how expensive the new Athlons are, wouldn't we? AMD give us lots of grunt for our dollars, and we can't expect them to pack every little feature into the CPU for the great prices they give us, any more than we can expect Apple to sell us an iPod for 50 bucks.

Now, the original article at Tom's has the following interesting quote ...

We rushed to the telephone to confer with Siemens. The engineers assured us that what we had seen was for real. The thermal diode of Palomino is unable to react quickly enough. Only 1 degree/s is what the thermal diode is able to handle.

I pointed this out the other day, too. A Siemens Engineer was consulted. Excuse me? An AMD CPU just fried itself on a Siemens-made board, and they don't ask the CPU manufacturer why it happened - they ask the board manufacturer. That's not where I'd be directing my enquiries if I was doing the test.

Now AMD prove that with a simple external board, everything shuts down and saves the CPU - just like we'd want to happen. To me, this suggests that the thermal diode has no problems reacting in time, and that maybe the board manufacturers screwed up or cut some corners when they were developing support for it.

It's understandable, for the same reason AMD didn't pack the chip full of power management goodies. Keeping costs down on goods that are bought by very price-conscious buyers looking for maximum performance at the best price. They implemented support that was adequate for a fan failure, which is the most likely thing that'll happen in real life. They could well have decided that a simpler circuit was all that was necessary, since a heatsink isn't likely to fall off.

Most likely we'll never know the full sotry. Everyone will blame everyone else, and in a year or so we'll forget all about it because the hardware will be obsolete. We'll have new problems. In the meantime, everyone has the message that they should be careful that they install their CPU cooling devices properly. AMD will recover from any negative press. Hell, Intel put out a bunch of CPUs that couldn't do Math at one point, and they survived. :)

So What They Are Saying...

[Root Down]

Let me get this straight - no, really. If I remove the apparatus that helps to cool something down, its temperature will go UP? Increased temperatures might cause something to melt?
I really don't see the rocket science in all of this. Heat sinks are strapped down to your CPU by a firm metal clip for a reason - they are necessary to keep your CPU cool - and by 'cool' I mean 'functioning'. Run a current through a thin piece of metal and the metal heats up. Physics. Try it yourself with some thin copper wire and a 9V battery.
Motherboards that are equipped to switch off when things get too hot would be great, but how many of you have had your heat sinks fall off? I am guessing a very small percentage - hardly worth the economic cost of equipping all motherboards with the sensor device. (Remember, that cost will just filter down to us anyway, so you might as well buy the device separately if you are worried.) If you're kicking your PC down the stairs twice a day, it might be worth investing in a little protection, but chances are you've got other worries by that point.

Why both are correct.

[Chas]

Tom's shows what happens if you use any Athlon
with any currently available motherboard.

While it's correct, it's like griping about no RDRAM support on an Athlon board. The feature isn't supported by the motherboard yet. End of story.

The AMD video shows what happens when you use an Athlon with a thermistor in motherboard that has the Power Now thermistor support..

And while it's also correct, it's basically vaporware until such a board debuts.

Re:I still wouldnt get an Athlon or any AMD chip.

[jmichaelg]

Intel stuff is just better engineered.
That statement is not supported by most benchmarks I've seen (excluding quake demos).

I have both Intel and AMD based machines and I'm not seeing any discrepancy in stability as measured by crash rates - Windows will as happily crash on the Pentium as it will the Athlon. As long as you cool the AMD properly and feed it clean power, it does just fine. Cheapo cooling and/or power supplies will break any cpu.

The bottom line for me is stability.
The bottom line for me is stability and performance. In my business (I grade children's arithmetic tests), I need all the fpu performance the Athlon can deliver and I'm not particularly inclined to pay 3 times the price for equivalent performance. Nor am I about to rewrite my code to take advantage of proprietary sse2 instructions to get that performance either.

Often enough

[Tridus]

"Yes, existing Athlon owners are at a SLIGHT risk of failure if their heatsinks fall off (I'd love to see REAL stats on how often THAT happens)"

This happens a lot with computers that are shipped (eg from Dell, etc). Thats probably one of the reasons why Dell doesn't do AMD, replacing all the chips that get fried by a heatsink coming off in shipping would be a lot more expensive.

(and I've had this happen to me before actually, although it was with a P3, which of course didn't fry because Intel put some thought into the design)