There were some stirrings on the Web when certain sites published a video that tried to prove there is full thermal protection on AMD Athlons with the Palomino core in reaction to an article and video we ran recently called Hot Spot: How Modern Processors Cope With Heat Emergencies . Just for the record, Palomino Athlons include the Athlon XP, Athlon MP, and the Mobile Athlon 4s. It might also help for some people to review the article to get a more accurate picture of what we actually did and showed in our video. Anyhow, despite the rumors, it now turns out that the video posted by some other web sites (not the video in our article) has its origin within AMD. It didn't show an independent test, but is actually a marketing video produced by AMD. This was confirmed yesterday by AMD. The video was not intended, however, for the press, but was meant for the OEM customers of AMD. AMD says that it regrets that an employee of the company did not adhere to internal company rules and leaked the video to some websites.

It turns out that it is particularly annoying to AMD that contents of the video were shown out of context. The video is actually part of a Powerpoint presentation AMD prepared for its customers knowing that Intel was pointing its customers to the Hot Spot article on THG. Hey, it's opportunism on the part of both companies. We are actually in possession of the complete presentation and were a little upset, to say the least, by the assumption that somehow our tests were not accurate. You can check out our response and evaluation of AMD's approach for yourself in our Cooling Off article from Monday .

Here are some images from our German counterparts, on the right side you can see a small extra board tagged "Watch the LED", which shows where the actual motherboard was extended by AMD. It is not by any means a standard motherboard, or something you can buy at present. Only future motherboards will have the new thermal protection as and when it's adopted by motherboard vendors. The AMD solution is something that is being offered for guidance to motherboard vendors for inclusion in future products. So, that should finally clear up that debacle, and AMD said it will inform Tom's Hardware as soon as proper boards with functioning Thermal Protection are available. In the same AMD presentation there is a second video that shows the Intel Pentium 4 not being as stable as our video demonstrated. Pure marketing, but why did everyone jump the gun on this one without looking at the source? Guess there's a little unwholesome competition amongst hardware sites on the web as well as amongst the purveyors of processors. And, for those who say that the tests were the equivalent of draining all the oil and coolant out of a car and seeing how long it would run before the engine seized up (which I've read on a number of forums), I'd hope that expensive car had a gauge on the dash to let me know to shut the thing off if I developed an unexpected leak.