Question about CPUs. (Warning: A stupid one)

[AmigaMance]

 Can a CPU (68k, PPC603) become slower by the passing of time, if it suffers from mechanical (bumps) or thermal stress?
 I'm not talking about the clock frequency, which will be always the same (i guess) but about the overall performance of that CPU.
 Well, i warned you that this is a stupid question, so be gentle. :-D

[AmigaMance]

I remember that Register article. I also knew exaclty which date to search for it in the archive.

I went to 2007, and then April, and then Sunday 1st:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/04/01/cpu_time_dilation/

 Now, who am i suppose to believe? All you ignorants or Professor Asteio Artikolos?! My money on him. :lol:



@CLS2086

Actual harddrive must be replace at least each 2 years if they are used 10h/days, after that they lost 50% of the speed output.

My source : my main pecee made in 2001 (Sisoft Sandra 2003/2004, chipset HTP Raid 370, swap+temp on an another HDD)
IBM 46 Gb : after 1 year, around 40% of perforce lost, then brokedown
Maxtor 20 Gb : after 3 years, around 50 % of perforce lost
Seagate 120 gb : after 1 year, around 20 % of perforce lost
Maxtor 300 Gb : after 1 year, around 10 % of perforce lost

 That's a very interesting post. Thanks, i did know about this. I have a 8GB IDE SeaGate in active use since... I don't even remember since when. I should have done some benchmarks when i first bought it so i could compare them with current benchmarks.
 I can't say that it feels slower but this might be because i'm using the standard IDE port of my Amiga 1200, which is already slow.

[AmigaMance]

Fats wrote:

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.

But you made the wrong conclusion from your observation. The CPU starts to run slower in order to generate less heat because it was especially designed to do so when a temp sensor senses it is becoming too hot.
It doesn't run slower by itself because a hot CPU chip runs slower.

 I have read every post on this thread and now that i understand how things works i'll have to agree with you. There is another mystirious issue related to this though:
 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.
 Note: I haven't experience anything similar as an 68040 owner, but my CPU is always cooled actively and it runs at 25mhz only.
 I know that 68040s are the most hot chips of the 68k family etc, etc, but still, this doesn't explain what these users experienced. It should only make their CPUs less stable, not slower.
 You could classified it as placebo but they seemed quite confident about it from their posts.