scott wrote:

> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365.html
> 
> It's quite old, but the basic outcome seems to be that the Intel CPUs 
> are impossible to damage by overheating.  With the AMD chip it relies on 
> the motherboard, but their demo shows that a motherboard temperature 
> sensor cannot react quickly enough to avoid frying the CPU when the HS 
> comes off.

Oh wow... 370°C after 1 second? That's pretty special!

Looking at this, it seems that in "the old days" some CPUs didn't have 
any temperature sensors at all. I would imagine given the *huge* amounts 
of heat that newer CPUs generate, this must have changed by now.

I still don't know whether the fan speed is hardware or software 
controlled, but I would think by now the system will at least turn 
itself off in a thermal emergency without software intervention.

As an aside... How much heat does the human brain generate? (By every 
estimate I've seen, it has vastly superior theoretical computational 
power compared to any supercomputer yet built by man.) How come human 
brains don't ignite and burn during normal operation? I don't see any 
really large heat sinks on a human...

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