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Pushing a CPU to Heat Death, Intentionally

Posted by timothy on from the or-maybe-it-will-loaf-along dept.

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.'"

7 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's the point? by Kamokazi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Destroying things is fun, especially done with unorthodox methods.

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  2. Must...resist...saying by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

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  3. Why should it even crash.. by SD-Arcadia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Re:Ummm, copying VW folks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  5. I really doubt by LM741N · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:The rule of thumb is.... by IllForgetMyNickSoonA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are quite a few guys around here who moderate "insightfull" instead of "funny" because "funny" gets you no karma and "insightfull"... well, does. :-)

  7. We did this at Transmeta by Dhar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.