Question Is it possible for an amateur coder's program to damage a CPU ?

[gamemaster3000]

I'm guessing the answer is 'no', but I'm writing a program that simulates millions of hands of blackjack and might leave it run over night.

I'm curious what happens on a physical level when you have variables in a program that get changed millions of times. Doesn't the constant electricity accessing them eventually heat them up?

 

[COLGeek]

If your system has proper cooling, this will have no impact to its physical safety. If it gets too hot, the system will throttle back to protect itself. If bad enough, it will shutdown.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm guessing the answer is 'no', but I'm writing a program that simulates millions of hands of blackjack and might leave it run over night.

I'm curious what happens on a physical level when you have variables in a program that get changed millions of times. Doesn't the constant electricity accessing them eventually heat them up?

Many many systems have processes running for hours and days, non-stop.

 

[Misgar]

If your program uses continuous AVX instructions, the CPU might start to throttle, but this is normal to prevent CPU overheating.
https://extensa.tech/blog/avx-throttling-part1/

If you have any concerns, you might be able to configure a negative AVX offset.
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/why-do-folks-set-an-offset-for-avx-when-ocing.3415087/

 

[CountMike]

That reminds me of a program called "Door stopper" someone wrote for old Motorola 6800 CPUs that accelerated them until they broke or melted. That was long time ago (1980s) more modern CPUs have mechanisms to throttle or shut down before unsafe temps are reached,

 

[TerryLaze]

Motorola 6800 CPUs

68000, forgot a zero there.

If your system has proper cooling, this will have no impact to its physical safety. If it gets too hot, the system will throttle back to protect itself. If bad enough, it will shutdown.

Taking it for granted that the system is properly set up.
With so many mobos having a field day with CPU settings and having them very dangerously close to exploding it's always necessary to check that the bios settings are ok for the CPU.