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June 16, 2006
Burnin laptops
In what had to be one of the most interesting starts of conversation, a particpant on the darwin-dev mailing list sent out a request on how throttle back the CPU on his Intel Mac. What made the request so notable were two things.
First, the request was being made due to sensativity to the RF or possible EM being produced by the processor. This is something of an unknown area of science, one I find rather interesting. Dr. Howard Oakley responded with some fascinating research to counter the original author's claims.
Second, the response from an Apple employee. While it's obviously a little tounge-in-cheek reply, the impression it left me with was that there is little that can be done to reduce frequency speeds on the Intel macs.
I think it probably would have helped had Ethan simply stated that there is nothing stopping this user from programmatically adding in some means to control the cpu frequency speed, but there were no promises that OS X would abide by the values set from the program. It kind of sounds like he's suggesting the Intel CPUs don't do that, unlike the former PowerPC, and that was one of the main reasons quoted for moving to Intel architecture.
Oh well... it'd also have killed the humor in the response. Go figure.
Posted by Dan at June 16, 2006 06:41 PM