It does sound weird -- at first I thought it would simply blow these inexpensive fuses and cripple your non-inexpensive processor. But after reading it a second time it seems that it would scale back on the speed in localized areas (which has not been done before to my small knowledge) to lower temperatures.

I guess this is a good move on IBM's part. It seems more effective in that the speed is (aparrently) lowered in very localized regions, such as the Floating-Point Unit, or some other section of the processor that could be running out of spec (too hot) while the rest is working great. I can see where it would be better than monitoring overall temperature and scaling the entire processor back. And their using electromigration to do this is pretty spiffy too. If I had a processor that needed to scale back to cool off, I'd love for the parts that need the break to get a small break/cooldown while the rest of the processor that is healthy keeps ticking away. So, definately a great move. And I sure hope that this is what IBM has done