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AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

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11–20 of 88 posts

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#11

For those who just read the title: the "fuse" doesn't stop the cpu from working, it's just a flag for AMD support to know that the chip has been overclocked and this might invalidate the warranty.

To me this is actually a reasonable thing for AMD to do. It still leaves me free to do whatever I want with my property.

[flagged]

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#12

For those who just read the title: the "fuse" doesn't stop the cpu from working, it's just a flag for AMD support to know that the chip has been overclocked and this might invalidate the warranty.

On a related note, AMD's EPYC CPUs have eFuses that enforce a vendor lock. This means you can't transfer an EPYC CPU from, say, a Dell server to a Lenovo server.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-psb-vendor-locks-epyc-cpus-...

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this is actually a reasonable thing for AMD to do. It still leaves me free to do whatever I want with my property.

[flagged]

If Nvidia/Apple/Intel used hardware fuses? Hahaha!

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#16
I see no problem with this. If you overclock and damage you obviously shouldn't be able to claim warranty. The only thing that isn't as black and white is how they know if an overclocked faulty chip is faulty because of the overclock, or something else.

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#17

I don't know if overclocking pays off much these days. The chips are already taken close to limits with factory settings, so there's not much overclocking potential unless you use extreme cooling. I fondly remember the Core 2 Duo days when I overclocked my CPU with more than 50% using the stock cooler. It's nice to 50% performance for free, particularly when you are poor. I even remember overclocking an old laptop wi…

The days of creating a resistor bridge with a pencil to enable extra cores and altering the multiplier are long gone. I still remember pushing my duron with a massive aluminium block on top of it getting 100+mhz more out of it.

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#18

I don't know if overclocking pays off much these days. The chips are already taken close to limits with factory settings, so there's not much overclocking potential unless you use extreme cooling. I fondly remember the Core 2 Duo days when I overclocked my CPU with more than 50% using the stock cooler. It's nice to 50% performance for free, particularly when you are poor. I even remember overclocking an old laptop wi…

One argument used to be that there's always manufacturing tolerances that you can exploit to your advantage. However, those tolerances were in many cases optimized out of the process by better binning -- if a particular CPU reliably worked at a higher clock speed, it would simply be sold at a higher speed.

But also, whether a chip is actually stable at settings X or Y has become a lot harder to determine due to complexity: multicore architectures, frequency scaling and power management in general make it hard to predict how a chip will behave under real conditions. It has become unrealistic for a user to test all cores under all possible combinations of workloads. Consequently, and from anecdotal experience at least, many overclocked systems seem a lot less stable than their owners claim.

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#19

I don't know if overclocking pays off much these days. The chips are already taken close to limits with factory settings, so there's not much overclocking potential unless you use extreme cooling. I fondly remember the Core 2 Duo days when I overclocked my CPU with more than 50% using the stock cooler. It's nice to 50% performance for free, particularly when you are poor. I even remember overclocking an old laptop wi…

The most basic "overclocking" these days is actually undervolting. The clock speed you can leave to the chip.

The undervolting makes the chip run cooler, which in turn means it can stay at higher frequencies longer.

Re: AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking

#20
The use cases for overclocked CPUs are dead to me.

There are so many other dominating factors that it is almost pointless to worry about per core frequency.

Memory bandwidth is probably a bigger constraint for many practical applications. Faster core clocks doesn't do anything to resolve that.

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