Stalls are not necessary for thermal regulation, DVFS [1] is the tool we actually use for handling thermal limits (generally referred to as "thermal throttling"

Stalls are not necessary for thermal regulation, DVFS [1] is the tool we actually use for handling thermal limits (generally referred to as "thermal throttling"). In a modern CPU, you really don't expect (or, rather, want) to be fully stalled ever, that's the point of very deep reorder buffers. You can try this yourself, make a long loop with a ton of unrelated int and fp operations (unrelated so as not to cause dependency chains) and you'll get 100% occupancy without the core catching on fire. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_frequency_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_frequency_scaling