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Re: Pismo status



At 4:33 PM +0200 5/18/00, Sven LUTHER wrote:
On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 10:15:24PM -0700, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:
 The PowerPC 750 (G3) and 7400 (G4) can both fire off an interrupt
 when the on-die temperature sensor reading rises above a trigger
 value (or falls below a second trigger value).  This feature *could*
 be used by an operating system to slow down the CPU (through the

So this mean that the G3 and G4 cpus have both the equivalent of
speedstep/whatever that AMD & Intel are introducing as a big novelty ?

Sort of. The method is quite different. I think AMD and Intel are actually changing the core clock rate of the processor in response to system conditions. The 750 and 7400 can't do that. Instead, they can restrict the speed at which instructions can be fetched from the I-cache into the prefetch queue, which in turn results in lower power use (and of course lower performance) due to the dynamic power management features of the 750 and 7400, which save power by completely halting the clock going to idle functional units.

 instruction cache throttling feature) or halt it to prevent
 overheating.  However, there is no hardware feature which can halt
 the CPU without software control.

Are you sure about this ? did you already manage to burn out a ppc cpu like
you do when running a pentium without a fan ?

There is no mention of such a thing in the PowerPC 750 manual.

  Tim Seufert



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