Throttle
From Extreme Overclocking
No, not the thing that's in your car or on your bike. Throttling is what a CPU will do when it gets too hot. This may be caused by a fan-failure, or a pump-failure in case of watercooling, or simply insufficient cooling.
Basically, when throttling, a CPU clocks itself way back. Sometimes to just a few hundred Mhz. This way it consumes and thus emits a lot less energy, making it cool back down.
There a two types of thermal throttling on intel processors.
- One type is available in Pentium 4, Xeon, Celeron (Northwood and Prescott cores only) and Pentium M processors. In this type the Thermal Throttling function does not physically lower the CPU clock, but it inserts idle cycles between the instructions sent to the CPU core (i.e. it inserts wait states inside the processor), which lowers the processor performance, hence its temperature.
- The other type is used on socket 775 Pentium 4 and Celeron and Pentium M processors, this type really lowers the CPU clock. This is done by lowering the CPU clock multiplier.
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