re cpu temperature vs cpu activity 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 my friend claims that there will be little difference in the temperature of an idle cpu and a cpu running a computationally intensive job lino montuno 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 victor buttigieg e mail victor uk ac man ee comms communications research group university of manchester
