Or could you write a virus or trick someone in to do doing just that? When did thermal throttling first become a thing for that matter?
To my knowledge very early AMD Athlon CPUs had no thermal protection and if you’d take off a cooler while it was running you’d see smoke after a while. There’s a very old video showing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y39D4529FM4
I built a PC up and had issues trying to post. As I diagnosed the issue I took off the fan/heatsink. No idea why tbh. I powered it back on forgetting to reseat the heatsink. I could smell a burning smell and ripped out the power as quickly as I could. It was too late. I fried the CPU. It was a burnt purple colour underneath. Had to go buy another CPU. What a waste of money :(
I don’t recall a time when CPUs were frying themselves in large quantities. Thermal shutdowns and thermal clock throttling were developed in tandem with the need for them.
Yeh this is what I wondered about. I feel like it would have been a more well known thing had it been a thing. I’m having trouble establishing when thermal throttling was introduced. Wikipedia references a few commercial techs that seem to start around 2002. That’s a lot more recent than k was expecting.
I wouldn’t have used a computer much until around 1995-96ish but I don’t recall ever hearing about this as a thing that could happen. But then, if there was no such tech in place, shouldn’t it theoretically be the case then that you could tax a system until the hardware is physically too hot and gets damaged?
I don’t know when it was introduced exactly. Thermal shutdown is much older. It used to be that CPUs/boards had no way to change the clock speed: it was just a quartz crystal oscillator soldered to the board, or at best plugged in to a DIP socket, so you could cold-swap it with a different speed oscillator.
In theory, a sophisticated enough virus could certainly disable thermal shutdown protection, and then run things super hot to try and overheat the processor, but the thermal shutdown logic is pretty deep in the CPU and you might actually need a BIOS update to modify it.
Probably an easier route would be to just use whatever overclocking API you can to raise voltages way higher than they’re supposed to get. That’s essentially what caused problems with the last few generations of Intel processors to fail, except it was faulty power management logic and not a virus.
Ah I see how I should have written my title now. I mean before thermal throttling was a thing on processors.
Been using computers since the 8088. I do not recall this ever being a problem outside of the already mentioned “if you remove the cooler” AMD CPUs of the mid-2000s or so iirc. If you remove the cooler from any CPU that comes with a stock cooler you’re going to have a bad day though.
Yeh this tracks with my never having really heard of it, but I wonder why though. It seems logical that a mass market product would have a few people that didn’t understand its limitations and you’d think if it was possible to just keep getting hotter until the cooler is overwhelmed, that that would happen more than a few times to people.
