Yet they point made earlier about CPUs being able to handle whatever you throw at them is valid.
If GPU silicon, firmware, and drivers are not able to ensure that the chip and card are never able to be run in such a way that they might damage themselves, then the GPU vendors are doing something seriously wrong.
But there are key differences.
1: A CPU does not have any power circuits on it. The motherboard handles all the power delivery. If this issue happened for a CPU, the CPU would not be impacted at all. It would be the motherboard that failed. Which
HAS happened. But the blame is always on the motherboard maker, not the CPU manufacturer.
2: At most, a consumer level CPU has 16 cores. A GPU has thousands, so load transients can be significantly larger.
3: CPUs use less power than the GPUs being impacted by these issues. So if a load profile was created that could cause large transient spikes on a CPU, those spikes would be much smaller.
4: The types of loads a CPU sees are drastically different from what a GPU sees. CPUs being general purpose means they are constantly context switching. Video encoding or the like would be similar, but those loads are very constant. Little risk of transients.
And for the second time, I am not defending the GPU makers.
And for those saying there is no reason the GPU makers could not prevent this sort of thing, they are limited in what they could do. Yes, the board maker could add in some sort of hardware over current protection, and have circuit breakers that would shut all power off to the card if it hit the designated limit. However, these circuits rarely react fast enough to handle transients. So then it comes down to only triggering for sustained load, which would result in system crashes if that limit was hit. Which would inevitably make end users angry, and then look bad for the board manufacturer.
Most cards already have software power limits, but these will also not catch transients. And if the software detects high power usage, all it can really do is ramp down clocks in an attempt to lower power consumption. These systems have to have a lot of averaging in them though, and they are slow to react.
All of these issues can likely be tracked back to the fact that newer high end GPUs draw crazy amounts of power. With these very high loads, there is far less room for error in the power delivery circuit. We saw this with the 12pin power connectors, and the EVGA 3090s. A tiny build up of tolerances resulted in catastrophic failure of the units. High end GPUs used to only draw 200-300W. Now we have cards that draw 450W.