123
AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking Is Enabled
(www.extremetech.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
123 points (94.2% liked)
Technology
59118 readers
6622 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"fuse" implies that the CPU will stop working when it is overclocked, this seems to be more of a mechanism for AMD to let them know that the reason the CPU is not working anymore is because it was overclocked and fried.
Somewhat.
All this fuse does is tell AMD that the chip has had custom clocks or voltage applied to it (this appears to also apply to underclocking and undervolting as far as I can gather)
It does not prove that if the chip is faulty that it must be the OC/undervolt/whatever that caused it.
Think of those water detection strips in other products. They can tell the manufacturer if something has been in a humid environment, but just because it has been doesn't guarantee that that is what caused the fault to come about.
Yet Apple throws those phones out of warranty regardless of what caused the fault
Apple is the bad exemple
That was years ago, the phones have been waterproof for a long time- I would certainly file a warranty complaint with Apple if my waterproof iPhone was damaged from humid air, rain, falling in the tub as it’s rated to survive all those things. In fact, 5+ years ago people were doing tests dropping phones down 30 feet under water and bringing them up just fine.
Laptops on the other hand are not rated for water, and you’re right, a laptop full of purple spill sensors gets denied unless you bitch hard enough.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204104
Apple will not cover water damage, even though the phone has protection.
No, this means something else in chip design. For example, an AVR microcontroller can be configured by blowing some fuses. Here is an introduction: https://www.ladyada.net/learn/avr/fuses.html
Understandable but this is not a fuse in common usage of the word, which is used to break a circuit to protect against over-current. Rather it's an part that changes state irreversibly (much like a fuse would) when something happens. There is no implication that it would cut off the power to the CPU in this sense.
It's just an electronic component, like resistors and transistors. Samsung has something similar in their phones called Knox.