1

I am doing a physics project that involve measuring the temperature of the CPU. As some of you may know, I need to know the specific heat capacity of the material that is being measured upon (aluminium, silicon or air, most likely in this case). Therefore I'd appreciate it, if someone could share their knowledge about the CPU temperature probe.

1 Answer 1

2

The answer would depend on what CPU you're talking about. Where and how many sensors are required is up to the manufacturer.

With Intel's x86 chips they tend to have one thermal sensor per core and one for the whole package at a minimum. So a quad core has at least five. These are embedded in the wafer itself so you won't be able to practically locate them even after delidding but you can use the SHC value of doped silicon as an approximation of the heat capacity of the unit.

4
  • Modern Intel x86 chips have one thermal sensor for each physical core, the GT core (aka Integrated Graphics) (if present), package (Intel said this but I don't know what it exactly is) and cache.
    – iBug
    Apr 3, 2017 at 1:46
  • The package is everything Intel supply to OEMs. So it includes the heatspreadder and pins on LGA but not on FGA.
    – Linef4ult
    Apr 3, 2017 at 3:05
  • I've never heard a CPU has a FGA package. Did you mean BGA (welded on board)?
    – iBug
    Apr 3, 2017 at 4:44
  • Yeah, typo there. Should have been BGA (and PGA).
    – Linef4ult
    Apr 4, 2017 at 17:05

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .