Question about CPUs. (Warning: A stupid one)

[da9000]

Xamiche wrote:
Enough, I don't want anymore forum wars. I can go to the Archlord forums for that. I know what we observed. When we slow the fans the programs performance degraded.

I never said a CPU can get slower with age. I never said P4 don't down clock. My post is a response to someone who wondered why they benchmarked lower with the same system several years apart. Our trial may cast some light on why.

You also compared oranges to apples. A Celeron of that age (466Mhz) has no throttling like a P4 in your tests. Unrelated. Just listen to Piru and Zac and those who agree with them. They know what they're talking about.

[da9000]

AmigaMance wrote:
 I've read 3 posts from 3 different users, here and in other forums who claim that their 68040 becomes slower when it is not properly cooled. Not 1 or 2 but 3 reports.
... You could classified it as placebo but they seemed quite confident about it from their posts.

That maybe so, but who's to say that those users have:

1) made the right conclusion (I can see a speed increase when I muck around with hardware, but along with adding a fan, I also swapped video cards, and perhaps due to some intricate timing issues which I didn't consider due to lack of knowledge [think of Shared-Memory video solutions on PeeCees] I saw a speed increase, therefore my conclusion that adding a fan makes things faster is flawed)

2) are qualified to make the right conclusion (many people can change a fan, but few understand the more or less complete internal workings of a computer to such a degree as to make qualified conclusions. In fact, what's evident from this thread is who is a low level programmer / systems engineer and who is not. I can quite clearly give you a run down of the names without ever knowing anything about these people, and it's simple: a low level programmer / system engineer would swear by what Zac is saying as far as instructions and data in CPU calculations: there's no "error correction" and "retries" and such B.S., other than CRC/ECC calculations on the data buses of course. The CPU either works or doesn't, which will produce a hardware exception, or a Guru Meditation if you will. To think of a modern day CPU as having error corrected address/offset/pointer/arithmetic calculation is simply ludicrous)

Synopsis:

CPUs don't slow down as they age. They die a sudden death.

Hard disk drives and other mechanical devices don't slow down as they age, per se, but can exhibit slower "observed"  or "net" behaviour, which is due to bad media (bad blocks) or damaged mechanical parts (motor spins slower, possibly due to power issues, or due to friction caused by heat or cold, physical shock, and other such mechanical failures)