> > I don't think I made the "Thermal Monitor" feature > > clear enough. From what I've read at Intel's > > website, I believe it is built onto the P4 chip, > > Yes, most current processors have a thermistor on chip & some > means of signalling the die temperature through the pin array.
the P4 has numerous thermal sensors (actually, diodes, not thermistors) scattered all over its die as a local section can heat up much faster than a overall sensor could measure. Per the various engineering articles I read on it, individual subsystems will throttle independantly, so, for instance, the SSE2 multiplier section could be throttled while the rest of the CPU continues to run at normal speed. btw, its my understanding that existing AMD Athlon CPU's haven't contained any temperature diodes on die, instead have relied on the motherboard makers to put external thermal diodes on the motherboard... Tom's Hardware pages (www.tomshardware.com) has some interesting videos of AMD chips literally going up in smoke in seconds when the heatsink fan was removed. Less you think this is silly, I know someone who did this without realizing what would happen. They were changing the heatsink fan on a live production server as it was getting noisy. They thought they could pop one off and put another one on in seconds, but the CPU melted down before they could slap the new one on there... Burned a hole in the motherboard, the whole thing had to be replaced. _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
