A wolf in sheep's clothing?

It came out rather late last week that the 1.5GHz Pentium 4 has a clock throttling capacity not unlike Intel's latest range of mobile processors, except the chip throttles down as dictated by heat requirements, not power availability. We in the

It came out rather late last week that the 1.5GHz Pentium 4 has a clock throttling capacity not unlike Intel's latest range of mobile processors, except the chip throttles down as dictated by heat requirements, not power availability. We in the office thought to ourselves 'cool, this is a Good thing' - no one wants to cook off their bright, shiny and new processor if they can help it. Then things go crazy, as messageboards start lighting up all over the place with reports that this throttling (an ugly word if you type it too much) happens at the most inopportune of times because of Intel's 54.7 watt cut off; exceed that and your processor drops to 750MHz.

The Intel bashers came out in force, and suddenly the P4, already suffering a lot of poor press (some of it rather deserved) is under attack from another front. The classic point raised in the original post goes something like this:

'This effectively turns your 1.5GHz processor into a 750MHz processor – just at the moment you demand peak performance. On the other hand, you will probably still be able to check your email at 1.5GHz.'

Hilarity, funnily enough, ensued, until wiser heads prevailed to point out the shortfalls of the arguments against the P4 - including Intel itself. The big issue here is proper heat management, such as having, in the words of an Intel PR flack quoted on the (H)arOCP site , 'a robust heatsink'. Look at this way - everyone knows that AMD's Athlon and Duron chips are notoriously hot, and many a less than attentive overclocker has turned his expensive new purchase from a high-tech marvel into a pile of interesting silicon in no time flat. Intel's clock throttling should stop that dead, meaning that it only drops to 750MHz if you are not cooling it properly. I hate to say, but Intel is actually in the right here, and halving the price of the P4 is only making it look better and better.
Intel