The tale of the cases


admittedly i'm only doing some light web browsing...
Even my quad 3.4ghz desktop likes to keep itself down around 1.5ghz unless something's happening. If I compile something -j6 and it takes more than a couple minutes it starts screaming about overheating and throttles down noticeably. I should probably check the fan, with adequate cooling I could improve that.
The point being that, while it can get up to 3.4ghz, that is not the normal usage, and while you can put all kinds of fancy cooling into it to maintain higher clock speeds for longer periods of time it doesn't change the fact that the are being designed to throttle automatically when they get too hot, and they get too hot when run at max clock for extended periods of time.
 
Multicore setups can also do things like throttle down or turn off most of the cores and then let just one run at max speed. I remember one of Intel's advertisements mentioning that for their turbo boost.
 
I don't get the argument in regard to desktop systems. I can run my 8-core CPU overclocked at full load for hours with air cooling. Sure, it does get pretty warm, but it doesn't throttle. It may also get too hot after a few more hours, who knows. It's not like it's designed to not run at that speed for more than 5 minutes though.

Mobile is a different story of course, but this put me off a bit.
 
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