An internal presentraion, which gives every apparent sign of originally coming from AMD*, has upped the ante on a furious discussion over whether machines using its processors go phut if they become suddenly uncool. That follows a flurry of activity on hardware and overclocking sites everywhere yesterday as a debate flowed to and fro on the burning issue of the day. A report on the Pabster claimed to show some weeks back that if a heatsink became detached from an AMD CPU, a Pie Lane scenario could follow. In other words, what this boils down to is whether having a Palomino is a fire risk or not.
According to the Powerpoint presentation, AMD has shipped more than 35 million Athlon and Duron chips without any report of a "properly" installed heatsink and fan combo "falling off" during normal operation.Further, claims AMD, the thermal diode in the "Palomino" and "Morgan" cores reports the CPU temperature to logic on a motherboard. If there is danger of overheating, this diode ensures that the rest of the circuitry knows about it and the mobo shuts down so fires can"t occur.