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

Why don't they just put some thermal feedback system in it, making the chip inherently safe?

Speaking as an engineer, this is an essential feature.

From AMD's language, and common sense, the thoughts on this impacting warranty are misguided. I suspect this is a normal feature designed for debugging.

If I am AMD, and I e.g. receive 20,000 defective / failed chips returned from a bad run, or am sampling failures to just improve reliability, I want to know how those devices failed.

If, what's failing, are overclocked chips, I probably do want to lock down chips, void the warranty, or similar. If what's failing is a distribution of chips representing real-world use, I want to address the defect. In either case, if doing an RCA to understand the defect, I want to know how the chip was used. Reporting of maximum temperature, voltage, overclocking, etc. (all the data HDD keep in SMART) is super-helpful for that sort of analysis.

Also: Voiding warranty for overclockers would have been dumb. I've never overclocked, but for anyone here running a business: Vocal thought leaders are important to your brand. Overclocking may be out-of-spec, but if you want the word on the street to be that your chips are awesome, they had darned well be singing your praises. I've never overclocked, but I've cost both Google and AMD millions of dollars of business:

* I used to do business with Google before they broke my personal account, wiped out data for a startup I was working with, and broke / discontinued several services I rely on. I'm well enough known that me going around saying "Don't build a business on Google" (and ditto for many other folks on HN) means that GCP is starting a 100 meter dash with Azure and AWS about a hundred extra meters back.

* I bought an AMD GPU for machine learning since I liked open-source. It didn't work, and AMD discontinued support a few months after I bought it. AMD wouldn't provide warranty support for lack of suitability to advertised purpose. I learned my lesson, and tools I'm building (which will likely have broad-based adoption) don't support AMD.

There are customers you want to treat like a restaurant treats a food critic. It's not about them being profitable directly, but they're super-important.

First Thought: Are those CPU's available (at Dell-sized quantities) with vendor-specific features? If so, Dell has excellent reason to keep possibly-incompatible CPU's out of their systems.

Indeed, but trusting there is only one cause and it is always on user will is just abusive.

Does it means that CoreCtrl can blow the fuse when underclocking? I’m doing this to avoid my CPU push the fans when doing casual browsing.