I don’t think that the voltage issue is simply heat, not unless it is some kind of extremely-localized or extremely-short-in-time issue internal to the chip. I hit the problem with a very hefty water cooler that didn’t let the attached processor ever get very warm, at least as the processor reported temperatures.

Wendell, at Level1Techs, who did an earlier video with Steve Burke talking about this, looked over a dataset of hundreds of machines. They were running with conservative speed settings, in a datacenter where all temperatures were being logged, and he said that the hottest he ever saw on any hotspot on any processor in his dataset was, IIRC, 85 degrees, and normally they were well below that. He saw about a 50% failure rate.

If we hit the problem on our well-cooled CPUs, if the CPU simply getting hot were a problem, I’d have expected people running them in hotter environments to have slammed into the thing immediately. Ditto for Intel – I’d guess (I’d hope) that part of their QA cycle involves running the processors in an industrial oven, as a way to simulate more-serious conditions.