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I worked alongside this team. Without going into too much details, PTIM vs STIM are primarily cost driven. Engineers are not stupid, which is what Linus, et. al. claim. In fact, they know and listen to what Linus has to say about shitty PTIM. I would love to tell you everything that goes into selection of TIM but for obvious reasons, I cannot. You'd be surprised the amount of engineering that is behind something as simple as thermal interface material.

As they say, good engineering is about optimal tradeoff between every aspect of your product. That includes cost (directly, we are responsible for it) and customer happiness (indirectly, since in a giant company, that gets handed off to the Marketing/PR team). These can get out of sync.

Here is some public information about PTIM: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150279762A1/en