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?

  • davelA
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    19 days ago

    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.

    • JimmycrackcrackOP
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      19 days ago

      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?

      • davelA
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        19 days ago

        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.