
For color grading and editing, one second is a tiny fraction of the time needed to complete transcoding and/or rendering tasks. For browsing, business, and many photography tasks-1,000 milliseconds is a long run at a full power. A few years ago, a review revealed that a popular slim-and-elegant laptop could run only one second at its advertised clock-rate before severely thermal throttling. To market slim-and-elegant, light-weight laptops with powerful microprocessors, computer manufacture’s exploit the ambiguity between performance specifications and actual laptop performance. Did it cool the microprocessor enough to let it speed-up to near its maximum speed-or did it merely keep the chip from a further slow-down? But you wouldn’t know how effective the fan cooling was. You, of course, would hear the fans spin-up when the render began. It is the chip’s slower speed that caused the render time to extend to 45-minutes. To keep itself from getting too hot, it slowed itself down and finished the render at a much lower speed. Then, at some point, the CPU chip might have gotten hot enough to thermal throttle. Or, it might have begun at an extremely high speed-a speed high enough to have finished the render in about 30-minutes. There’s no straightforward way to know the microprocessors speed as it progressed through your render. That seems a bit long, but it did get done. You start the render and it finishes in 45-minutes. Imagine you have a render you expect to take a bit longer than 30-minutes. What’s strange about its slowdown-you likely won’t be aware it is happening. The CPU chip slows itself until heat no longer threatens its existence.

When heat can’t be dissipated from a system, the microprocessor defends itself by thermal throttling.
Cpu power throttled meaning upgrade#
In all the market-speak extolling the great benefits that await you should you upgrade to a computer based on one of these new chips, what’s not mentioned is how much heat these chips can generate. ZombieLoad And Other Things That Go Bump In The Night
