re cpu temperature vs cpu activity in article apr nessie mcc ac uk victor comms ee man ac uk victor buttigieg writes lino montuno montuno physics su oz au wrote 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 i totally agree with your friend since when the cpu is apparently idle it is still in fact churning away millions of instructions per second checking for keyboard input for instance the exception to this is for cpu s used in laptops where the cpu can enter an idle state where it is just preserving its current status but doing absolutely nothing in this case it needs a hardware interrupt to get it going again actually the iapx family has a halt instruction that causes the cpu to cease processing instructions the cpu resumes processing either by being reset or by receiving an external hardware interrupt this is different from the power management facilities victor mentions of course whether an operating system s idle loop uses the halt instruction is another matter entirely kenneth r ballou voice oberon software inc fax one memorial drive cambridge ma internet ballou oberon com the views and opinions expressed above are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer
