No, nothing like that. It's just a term probably used by the designers to define the particular "regimes" a chip can operate in: if it is doing lightweight stu

No, nothing like that. It's just a term probably used by the designers to define the particular "regimes" a chip can operate in: if it is doing lightweight stuff it can run at a lower voltage, "closer to the edge" if you will, because the worst case dI/dt event is relatively small so maximum voltage drop is limited. This saves power and keeps the chip cooler. If the chip wants to suddenly start running some heavy-duty 512-bit wide floating point multiplies, it needs to inform the power delivery subsystem of it's intent and then wait for permission: this permission arrives in the form of a license, like "ok, you are now licensed to run L1 operations (heavy 256-bit or light 512-bit)". Sometimes this license change can be satisfied by just bumping up the voltage without changing the frequency. Other times there might not be enough headroom to increase the voltage enough and still stay within the operating envelope so a combination of voltage and lowered frequency is used, which is how you get license-based downclocking. This earlier article [1] explains in some detail the nature of these license transitions, including voltage levels and halted periods. --- [1] https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/01/17/avxfreq1.html https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/01/17/avxfreq1.html