Eli5, Why does heat slow down a computer?
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Largely so that more heat isn’t created.
When a computer is going as fast as it can, it continually creates more and more heat. Unfortunately for it’s health, a computer has important parts made out of thin pieces of metal and plastic. With too much heat, these parts melt or break. So modern computers have a thermometer connected to their most likely to overheat parts (GPU and CPU) and most operating systems will force the computer to go slower when it gets too hot.
If these failsafes aren’t working, the computer is free to go as fast as possible in whatever heat. But then those important parts break, and because the way they break makes the computer uncertain about what parts are breaking (just that it’s getting errors), it starts to take more time to do normal things because part of its time is taken up getting errors. If the computer is set up without circuit breakers and manages to keep running, it will eventually catch on fire or melt. Most experts agree that turning an expensive computation machine into a common smoke machine is bad.
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