AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking Is Enabled
AMD's New Threadripper Chips Have a Hidden Fuse That Blows When Overclocking Is Enabled
The formerly secret fuse will let AMD know you were overclocking if things go sideways.
"fuse" implies that the CPU will stop working when it is overclocked, this seems to be more of a mechanism for AMD to let them know that the reason the CPU is not working anymore is because it was overclocked and fried.
Somewhat.
All this fuse does is tell AMD that the chip has had custom clocks or voltage applied to it (this appears to also apply to underclocking and undervolting as far as I can gather)
It does not prove that if the chip is faulty that it must be the OC/undervolt/whatever that caused it.
Think of those water detection strips in other products. They can tell the manufacturer if something has been in a humid environment, but just because it has been doesn't guarantee that that is what caused the fault to come about.
No, this means something else in chip design. For example, an AVR microcontroller can be configured by blowing some fuses. Here is an introduction: https://www.ladyada.net/learn/avr/fuses.html
Understandable but this is not a fuse in common usage of the word, which is used to break a circuit to protect against over-current. Rather it's an part that changes state irreversibly (much like a fuse would) when something happens. There is no implication that it would cut off the power to the CPU in this sense.
"fuse" implies that the CPU will stop working
It's just an electronic component, like resistors and transistors. Samsung has something similar in their phones called Knox.
Fuses in this sense are write-once data. Once the fuse is burnt, only physical repair could revert the change. These are used as one-way-doors (like the Nintendo Switch firmware upgrade fuses https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Fuses#Anti-downgrade) or tripwires (like Samsung Knox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox#e-Fuse)
How come I bought first gen threadripper cpu for around $400 and mobo $400, but now their prices are like $2000 for cpu and $1000 for the mobo?
I'd like to get more pcie lanes than on 7950x.
Lack of competition, manufacturing consolidation, and inflation.
When the Threadripper Pro came out, you could get a machine from Lenovo with 12-16 cores for around $1800 including some ram, ssd, and a gpu. I just checked and now they start at $2800 for a zen 3 TR Pro with 32/1TB/A2000. It doesn’t seem like there is a practical way to build one yourself affordably for Zen 4 or Intel for that matter. A Xeon 3435X and mobo is also around $2500 for 112 lanes.
This was also present in Threadripper 5000, per the article.
Not a new thing, some motherboards even do this.
The Nintendo switch and probably other consoles also use fuses to stop you from downgrading major firmware versions. There's just a massive bank of fuses on the mainboard that blow when you upgrade
I picture the aurhor of this fearmongering title evil laughing while writing it.
You’ve said that twice on two separate posts now.
Either way, there is nothing fear mongering about this title, the article even confirms the title directly from AMD themselves.
That's fair, just like Apple devices (phones and iPods) have/had a detector in the headphone port for water damage.
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Lotta manufacturers have done that. I had an Android phone back in the day that was notorious for false positives on the moisture detectors. The phone was a piece of shit and a lot of people wrongly got denied on warranty claims because of supposed moisture.
So the purpose is to protect them if someone overclocks and fries it, meaning they know if you take it in under warranty and say you want this faulty part replaced?
pretty much, also stops any techs or engineers looking into possible problems of the product from spending hours wondering what went wrong before the user says (if at all) "oh yeah, i overclocked it btw".
It's only fair