But, if they fixed all those issues and released it in a Xeon/P4 Successor as has been seen more than once, I wouldn't be morally-offended by purchasing one.
Leo falls out of his chair, lands on the floor and twitches. Laughing hysterically, he's overheard saying something about "THWACKS, thwacks".
and wouldn't that be visible? not only in performance, but in CPU-Z or any of those sorts of programs? and it it's to prevent overheating the time when it would do that would be at load when it's actually hot, not idling.
It indeed would be noticeable in performance. The throttling though, is not invoked if the CPU is well-cooled. Noticeable in monitoring software? Don't know.
Pentium M. Got two Centrino system laptops at the office. Excellent design, execution, and performance. Intel hit a home run with them.