Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental Evaluation of Individual Hotspots of a Multicore Microprocessor Using Pulsating Heat Sources

by Rodrigo Vidonscky Pinto¹, Flávio Augusto Sanzovo Fiorelli^2,*

1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, University Centre of United Metropolitan Faculties, São Paulo, Brazil
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

* Corresponding Author: Flávio Augusto Sanzovo Fiorelli. Email:

Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer 2023, 21, 427-443. https://doi.org/10.32604/fhmt.2023.041917

Received 11 May 2023; Accepted 14 July 2023; Issue published 30 November 2023

Abstract

The present work provides an experimental and numerical procedure to obtain the geometrical position of the hotspots of a microprocessor using the thermal images obtained from the transient thermal response of this processor subject to pulsating stress tests. This is performed by the solution of the steady inverse heat transfer problem using these thermal images, resulting in qualitative heat source distributions; these are analyzed using the mean heat source gradients to identify the elements that can be considered hotspots. This procedure identified that the processor INTEL Core 2 Quad Q8400S contains one hotspot located in the center of its left die and four hotspots located near the lower left corner of its right die, which is consistent with the thermal response obtained for both the stress test applied to each core of this processor and the stress test applied to all of its cores.

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Keywords

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