On 7/14/2010 4:36 AM, scott wrote:


> Because that's what CPUs are designed to do. It was probably the RAM
> that was overheating giving corrupt data to the CPU.

Yep... There's usually a thermal sensor either on the die or on the 
motherboard.

Some older AMD's I believe rely on the mobo's thermal shutdown. an AMD 
chip can be damaged by heat before the mobo registers a problem. On the 
Intel side, the chip will throttle down to a snails pace to try to 
control the heat, if that doesn't work, it'll tell the mobo to shut off.

I'm not sure about the newer AMDs.

Another interesting thing that's fun to watch: On the later Intel Core2 
chips, they have an adaptive multiplier. When the CPU is idle, it will 
reduce its clock rate to save on energy and keep cooler when idle.

-- 
~Mike

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