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Pushing a CPU to Heat Death, Intentionally
sdougal writes "This site is showing a Pico-ITX board running Ubuntu with no cooling whatsoever. They even let the public guess how long it would last: 'Last week thousands of you placed bets on how long the new Pico-ITX board from VIA, the VIA EPIA PX5000EG, can last without any cooling whatsoever. An ARTiGO Builder Kit was offered as the grand prize. Yesterday afternoon the voting stopped and the Naked Pico Challenge started in earnest. We simply loaded up Ubuntu 8.04, set it to work playing an mpeg-4 video and then removed the heatsink, leaving the CPU and VX700 chipset bare to the world. We recorded the event here in this video and set up a live video stream so you punters can keep a watchful eye on the PX5000EG as it works away.'"
Ah, the point is to demonstrate how efficient the CPU is. Fair enough, I thought this was just breaking stuff for no reason.
Destroying things is fun, especially done with unorthodox methods.
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slashvertisement. There I said it.
VIA showing off their board, offering a VIA-equipped toy to someone, disguising the entire thing as a geek event and plastering it on geeky sites. Gee, that sure is great news for nerds, stuff that (doesn't) matter...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If a CPU is going to crash or go up in smoke after heatsink removal under load it will do so within 30 seconds. Since it hasn't done so yet and considering it's a 1W energy efficient CPU the only effect should be a reduction in its longterm lifespan (maybe it will only run 2 years rather than 8). I don't see the excitement here, until they take a hairdryer to it which they say they will do after two weeks. That should be interesting.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Yes, well... everyone everywhere should stop doing interesting things, because someone, somewhere may have done something similar. You don't per chance work for the US Patent Office do you? Software Patent Division?
that this is an experiment. They already know that the device will run indefinitely. No company would do a media event like this that would shed bad publicity on their product- except Microsoft, LOL.
The Via is a VERY low power processor.
Since its one of the 1 GHz processors in the board, TDP is 5W.
Depending on what power-feedback is involved, the processor might actually just go "I'm overheating, throttle back" and drop down to say 500 MHz at 2.5W or so. The MPEG decoding shouldn't even take too much power, since the CN700 chipset includes hardware MPEG2 decoding.
As a bonus, the box is OPEN, which improves the cooling.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Bog knows what this will get modded as - Off-Off topic, or is that Redundant?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who said it was original?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are quite a few guys around here who moderate "insightfull" instead of "funny" because "funny" gets you no karma and "insightfull"... well, does. :-)
Naturally, the Linux guys claimed if it had been Windows, we'd be looking at a dead server at this point in time :)
Nonsense. Every OS makes the basic assumption that the chip is processing instructions correctly. If the chip is told to jump to address A, and instead jumps to address B because it is overheating and confused, the OS is going to crash. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or AbsolutelyCrashProofOS-Z, it's still going to crash.
In all honestly the stability debate is getting old. The truth is that Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X are all about equally stable nowadays. All three of them pretty much only crash in the face of hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Back in my Transmeta days, I set up a demo doing exactly this...one of our CPUs playing movies without a heatsink, head-to-head with a comparable Intel and it's (hot) heatsink. It lasted all day, and only got slightly warm. Still, I always expected to get burned every time I stuck my finger on the die top for the reporters. Poor, poor Transmeta. :)
-g.
"20 degrees Farenheit." A true engineer uses metric.
Atom? Why bother. You can get an ARM that costs less, uses less power, provides better performance, and doesn't have a shitty instruction set from 1978.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.