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Athlon Thunderbird Thermal Sensor

I was talking about the fail-safe, anti-overheating temperature diode sensor found on Intel chips. If the HSF is disabled, the chip would automatically stop working thus preventing the methamorphosis of a keychain. 😉
 
Actually, when I think about it, there is a solution to that for the motherboard manufacturers if there isn't one.

Abit did this recently. They released a new beta bios for the KT7. It required you to plug in the fan from the heatsink onto a certain fan header that could read the RPM of the fan. If you didn't have your fan from the heatsink or any other fan plugged into that fan header it would read it as 0 RPM which to the motherboard said "the fan on the heatsink is disabled" and it then wouldn't allow you to continue to boot.

They made it optional or disabled it in subsequent BIOS released however because people who didn't read that they needed to do that were wondering why their mobo wouldn't boot 🙂

A fail-safe would be nice though, woulda saved a number of people from fried tbirds.
 
Just a minor correction, Tualatin = upcoming .13 micron Pentium III variant 🙂

I would believe the next Athlon core, Palomino will have such a sensor + overheat protection, because
- it really doesn't add much to the die area
- AMD's gotten much bad press from burnt GHz+ Tbirds
- power consumption is a big consern in Palomino's design philosophy
 
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