Further,
There might be two types of "movement" fracture damage occuring:
1. Movement between the substrate and the processor casing. This would be reduced if
the thermal conductivity between these two parts is good, in which case both will
expand together, rather than the substrate rapidly outstripping the still-cold casing.
2. Movement within the substrate itself. I suspect this isn't as significant since the
substrate is thin, but if the floating point "region" expands rapidly while the rest
of the chip is still cold due to heatsink inertia, then forces will be created within
the substrate. Some real numbers might show this to be negligable, but small effects
like this can become the most important when other problems have been solved.
----
Ultimately, the forces generated by all movement will be reduced if the temperature
difference between two parts is reduced, hence a slow(er) warming up would be
beneficial.
For instance, a quick jump from 68F to 115F is clearly worse than a quick jump from
85F to 115F, to quote John Pierce's figures.
----
I suppose that, overall, thermal damage is not that significant, but unix users who
are concerned can use the following:
su mprime -c "sleep 120; $PRIME_BIN_FILE -d >> $PRIME_LOG_FILE &" &
Yours,
======= Gareth Randall =======
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