cpu temperature vs cpu activity organization compact solutions canberra act australia this may be a very naive question but is there any basis for the claim that a cpu will get hotter when a computationally intensive job is running my friend claims that there will be little difference in the temperature of an idle cpu and a cpu running a computationally intensive job from what i ve seen in coursework most cpus never actually idle they will continue to service interrupts etc etc the clock will always be running at n mhz no matter what it s doing i suppose depending on the instruction the cpu may use circuitry which has more transistors than other instructions but if you consider the additional heat generated by only a handful of additional tiny resistors and then spread that heat dissipation over the cpu s packaging the change in temperature to the immediate environment ie the surface of the package will be negligible cheers ben ben j elliston bachelor of engineering computer engineering university of canberra ooo ooo email compsol fir canberra edu au v also ellib cbr cpsg com au uucp uunet munnari sserve adfa oz au compsol root fidonet origin compact solutions canberra act australia
