>> 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.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-5.html

demonstrates how older AMDs had *no* thermal protection at all. They 
even have a video of one of the CPUs actually smoking and glowing. Can 
you spell "fire hazard"?

> I'm not sure about the newer AMDs.

They added thermal protection a long, long time ago.

> 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.

Yeah, most processors do that now (especially "mobile" ones). Initially 
they just made it so that a certain temperature, the system powers off. 
But later they had adjustable fan speeds and adjustable clock speeds, 
and switching off cores and so on.

I'm still puzzled about this laptop though. Considering that fan control 
is both trivially simple and utterly safety critical, why is it 
controlled by the OS? Why isn't it hard-wired?

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