The cooler falling off is an impossible situation. It's a completely bullshit metric.
I don’t disagree - I can’t imagine that ever happening in real life. But taking the cooler off while it’s running? I can definitely envision my idiot 13-year-old self doing that back when I was building my first PC.
Intel CPUs of the time ran hotter, used more power, and had lower IPC, hence the higher clock speeds but lower actual performance. They had to invent some bullshit to make themselves look good.
Given this information, I probably still would have gone with the Athlon. Are you saying that a report about a very-difficult-to-trigger defect in the thermal safety single-handedly convinced thousands/millions of potential customers to choose the Pentium instead?
Besides, just a while before that generation thermal safety wasn't even a thing, if you remove the cooler from older Intel processors it just catches fire lol
I’m guessing that’s why thermal safety was a selling point, no?