> Probably because the better approach would be to stall the processor (or at least stall on power intensive instructions) until the requisite power has arrived.

Sorry to be pedantic, but... physics requires a degree of pedantry.

1. This is probably an ENERGY issue, not a power issue. Energy is the integral of power (or power is the derivative of energy: power is the change of energy over time).

2. Electronics can only really measure voltage easily. Everything else is converted to voltage to be measured. For example, to measure current, you create a resistor and then measure the voltage across the resistor. To measure power, you need to measure voltage, and multiply it with current. To measure energy, you take the integral of your power measurement. (No joke: that's how it typically works).

3. With a capacitor, you can measure your energy level. Capacitors are relatively inaccurate however (+/- 10% tolerances at the electronics level, and probably worse tolerances at the nanometer chipscale level). The voltage from a capacitor does roughly correlate to its energy level.

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Issue #1: Capacitors suck at energy storage, but they're all that engineers have at these speed and sizes.

#2: Voltage is the only thing that can be measured reliably, but it takes a long time (more than a few nanoseconds, aka 10s or 100s of clock cycles) to measure voltage. Measuring other variables, such as "Energy" (voltage level of a capacitor), or "Power" (change of energy over time, or voltage * current), takes even longer to measure.

#3: Computers are fast. 4GHz computer means that you have 0.25 nanoseconds to make a decision per clock tick. Waiting on the results of any calculation on #2 will naturally take dozens or hundreds of clock ticks to accomplish.

#4: That's best case scenario, assuming that capacitors are large enough to actually hold the energy you need to perform your calculations. But in an AVX2 situation, where your CPU suddenly will use up more Power (energy/time) than expected, you need to communicate to your power-circuitry to increase the voltage or current delivery to the chip.

#5: Sending commands to the power-circuits / VRMs, or worse case to the Power Supply, can take many milliseconds (millions of nanoseconds) before the Power Supply responds. A 200W chip at 1.25V will draw 160 Amps of current (0.160 coulomb of electrons per millisecond). A 1 Farad capacitor will lose 0.16 volts per 0.16 coulombs of electrons drawn, and hint-hint, you can't physically fit a 1-Farad capacitor in a chip (https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-dddab4aa574936f8a61437...).

#6: This means that the only reasonable approach with today's technology, is to wait for the VRMs or Power Supply to respond. Note: The Power Supply will naturally notice the voltage drop and automatically send more electrons down to the motherboard. But the time-scale the PSU operates is on the order of milliseconds. A millisecond is 1-million nanoseconds or ~4-million clock cycles AFTER the AVX2 units started getting used. If you run out of energy before the power gets to your chip... guess what? You get a brownout. Random cells in your chip were now turned off and the state of the CPU is a jumbled mess now.

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Where, how, and why to place capacitors around a chip is one of the most difficult PCB-issues an electronic engineer deals with. There's a LOT of "rules of thumb", making PCB-design / capacitors a mystic subject matter for many EEs.

Given the difficulty of the subject of power-delivery, energy calculations, and high-speed signals involved (a chip operates at the GHz band, drawing ~100 Amps on the clock-tick, and then 0 Amps between clock ticks!), I'm almost certain that there's a mistake in the capacitors somewhere.

Its a mystic subject that's very difficult to simulate, especially across varying workloads (AVX vs normal 64-bit code, etc. etc.). That's my bet for what's going wrong here.

Honestly, power-delivery is so awesome and complicated. I'm almost surprised that anything works at all these days.