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I just love his articles: reminds me of the good old days playing these great games. Just a note, he writes: "Overheating: Computers don’t much like to be

I just love his articles: reminds me of the good old days playing these great games. Just a note, he writes: "Overheating: Computers don’t much like to be hot and malfunction more frequently in those conditions..." One of the reason there are way less spurious crashes of desktop / game apps than back in these days is that now most CPUs have built-in temp sensor that automatically reduce the speed in the case of any kind of CPU overheating. So the piece of code they wrote performing computation and comparing to know good results that could find as much as 1% of broken systems (!!!) would probably not find anywhere near close that number nowadays: the CPU simply slows down if it overheats. Not sure what happens when GPU overheat and if these too have now built-in protection and not sure if they were trying to detect faulty GPUs too. Another common "symptom" was an aunt, uncle, friend of parents, calling and explaining that : "my computer works fine for a while then it doesn't work anymore"... And you'd go check their system, open it, and find a CPU full of dust (which TFA mentions). Nowadays I don't get these calls anymore from those people : they're still using computers, but once their fans get clogged the system simply works at a slower speed and don't overheat anymore.

zbyszek 14y ago
Interesting. I recall how we had to decrease the clock speed of the processors on a high-performance machine in order to reduce errors - these were detected by simple reproducibility tests. With code optimised to sustain a huge percentage of peak speed and a thousand or so processors, such problems can become manifest, even in the chilly environment in which the machine was housed.
Shivetya 14y ago
Simply had to add my name to this praise, this article in particular hits home so well it should be required reading for many
ferrouswheel 14y ago
GPUs have throttling as well. They happily burst up to the maximum clock speed, but in benchmarks that stress the GPU at max capacity for prolonged periods, one will often see the clock rate drop by as much as half to prevent overheating. ... at least, that's what my Nvidia GTX580 does!

zbyszek 14y ago

Interesting. I recall how we had to decrease the clock speed of the processors on a high-performance machine in order to reduce errors - these were detected by simple reproducibility tests. With code optimised to sustain a huge percentage of peak speed and a thousand or so processors, such problems can become manifest, even in the chilly environment in which the machine was housed.

Shivetya 14y ago

Simply had to add my name to this praise, this article in particular hits home so well it should be required reading for many

ferrouswheel 14y ago

GPUs have throttling as well. They happily burst up to the maximum clock speed, but in benchmarks that stress the GPU at max capacity for prolonged periods, one will often see the clock rate drop by as much as half to prevent overheating. ... at least, that's what my Nvidia GTX580 does!