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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.'"
It was an expensive lesson in the importance of the heatsink.
Of course, many of us can remember back when CPU's didn't even need heatsinks. My first build was a 486SX with a zif chip slot and no CPU cooling--hard to believe now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The rule of thumb among engineers is: One square inch of flat aluminum surface will dissipate one watt at room temperature and rise about 20 degrees Farenheit.
A CPU chip with 900+ pins run a bit cooler as it's a it more than one square inch if you an include the substrate, and a certain percentage of the heat will conduct itself down the pins.
Destroying things is fun, especially done with unorthodox methods.
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They should make the mp4 hours of video of hardcore pornography, and we can all make bets on what the final frame that it shows before locking up and shutting down will be about. Blowjobs, anal, AtM, Bukkake, fem domination, tentacle sex, etc. It will bring more people to RTFA and WTFS (Watch The Fucking Stream).
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
They've been doing this with aircooled VW engines for probably 50 years at shows and races. Pull the fan belt, drain the oil, and put a brick on the accelerator. Everyone pays a buck to bet on the time, and with any luck the engine explodes spectacularly, much to the crowd's pleasure.
Yet again, "on the internet" somehow makes it original...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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)
Like the ole Timex watch that "took a licking and kept on ticking" my desktop box, an ancient AMD Sempron 2600+ with a VIA chipset, unknown to me, lost its power connector to the CPU fan, which I only discovered by accident when replacing a hard disk drive. The CPU was hot enough to scald my finger, but neither its performance nor its stability has suffered one bit.
Of course, the heatsink was still connected. But the Sempron was IIRC most definitely NOT a low-power cpu.
Yes, I reconnected the CPU fan. But at least I know my sh*t can take the heat.
No video is available ;o{ .
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.
Sorry to nitpick, but doesn't the term "heat death" usually mean death by maximum entropy (i.e. no heat), and not death by heat?
I read Usenet for the articles.
We had a headless linux server that one day started beeping constantly for no apparent reason. With every intention on fixing it, after a couple of weeks of it still running ok, we just assumed the speaker had died so just ignored it (the server room being sealed away as it was). Then one day we had to move the servers to another room, went to pick the machine up, and "Jesus! This thing is boiling!".
:)
It was some ancient AMD chip that we literally couldn't buy new fans for any more, so we just snipped the speaker cable and let it carry on.
Naturally, the Linux guys claimed if it had been Windows, we'd be looking at a dead server at this point in time
throw new NoSignatureException();
How long before we see this up on www.microsoft.com/getthefacts/ with the headline:
"Linux will set your computer on fire."
You have been warned.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I mean, I can run for several hours without a heat sink or a fan.
A few years back, I was troubleshooting a problem on my desktop. It had a Duron 800 in it. I got tired of putting the heat sink and CPU fan back on every time I made a change, so I figured, what the hell, how hot can it get in the time it takes to try and boot. It made it through the boot fine. I mused "Works great! I bet it doessn't even get that hot. Wonder how hot it is?" With that thought, I reached in and touched the top of the CPU. It was so hot that it instantaneously branded the text and logo etched in the top of the chip onto my thumbtip, before I could react and yank my hand back. For a few weeks, until it sloughed off, it was readable in reverse on my thumb...taught me new respect for the current consumption & heat generation capabilities of CPUs.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
If I re-encode a movie I get: Do I care? Not really. Been like that for 3 years now. When it dies I'll swap it for a less powerful CPU and go totally silent.
How long will that be though? 2 years? 3 years?
which is totally what she said
ew... I can't quite see why anyone would ever want to watch that. I mean, I know some people are weird and would generally count myself as one of them.. but that video sounds almost as bad as having to judge your country's possible entries into the Eurovision song contest..
which is totally what she said
But the kermit the frog reaction video has to be one of the funniest to come out of it.
You really don't need the non-breakable space, but if you would have you got it backwards. The apersand goes before nbsp and the semicolon follows. If there are any spaces it won't work.
Will what melt, the CPU, the server, the building, or the polar ice caps?
Shit, my ice cream cone just melted...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
Hardhack is short for hardware hack.