re cpu temperature vs cpu activity in article c um f ux austin ibm com guyd austin ibm com guy dawson writes in article apr ucc su oz au montuno physics su oz au lino montuno writes 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 it first depends on what an idle cpu is doing i m not sure about dos but many multitasking oss have an loop like this loop is there anything to do yes do it goto loop no goto loop the cpu is not doing any work but it is still processing instructions i ve done some asic and digital design but not any cpu design it would seem to me that on a the fpu is not being used most of the cache is not being accessed the off chip buffers drivers are idle the multiplier isn t multiplying the barrel shifters aren t shifting microcode isn t microcoding etc this means transistors aren t switching which means less power dissipated in cmos which means less heat from what i understand the pentium shuts down those sections of the cpu which aren t being used in order to cut down on heat power dennis lou but yossarian what if everyone thought that way dlou ucsd edu then i d be crazy to think any other way backbone ucsd dlou dlou ucsd bitnet steve jobs and steve wozniak went to my high school
