Why does the performance of a computer processor deteriorate when it overheats?

Question

Why does the performance of a computer processor deteriorate when it overheats?

In: 8

Answer 1

temperature control is needed to keep it under a certain threshold. Apart of the obvious cooling, the other way to stop the temperature increase is to throttle down the number of operations that are happening, hence artificially slowing down the processor to let it cool.

Then there’s an emergency shutdown past a certain temperature.

It doesn’t get slow by itself, it’s slow down by a protection system.