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As a stab in the dark, I'd say that it's Intel's chips that perform more stably while overclocked, all else equal, because Intel comfortably holds the performance crown, and is thus very conservative in their binning. Right now, Intel's fastest desktop chip is an i7 990X, which is $1,029 on Newegg. AMD's is an FX-8150, at $199. Intel prices pretty fairly against AMD on the price/performance curve where AMD has a competitor, eg, the Core i5 3550 at $209 generally outperforms AMD's fastest chip. Pricing then soars off into the sky. Which is to say, if AMD bumps the speed of their CPUs, they'll release a faster product, compete better against Intel (until Intel reacts), and make more money. If Intel bumps its speeds, they're competing against nobody but themselves, so they usually don't bother. Therefore, you usually see Intel quite conservatively binning their chips, and they have a lot of headroom. It's not unusual to have an AMD chip that can't go 200mhz faster on air cooling, and to have an Intel chip that can go well in excess of 1ghz faster. So all else equal, bumping Intel chips is less likely to be an issue. Now, there are some other factors at play here. Firstly, hardcore overclockers pretty much only buy Intel chips. Also, people that are serious often turn up the speed until right before the moment at which the chip starts getting SuperPI errors (i.e. errors at nearly maximum load). But my totally uninformed gut feeling is that the majority of overclocks aren't done that seriously (if they are, it could actually reverse this analysis). If we assume that, turning the knob up on an Intel chip without sophistication is much less likely to end badly. The crashes in their paper are not very frequent on average (months between), which isn't necessarily bad enough to revert to old CPU speeds even if the user knows that's what is going on. |