HANDS ON GUIDE

Adaptive Thermal Monitor

Less drastic than before

Previously when a processing core became too hot, it would drop to its lowest operating frequency by dropping to its lowest multiplier value. This was seen as too drastic by Nehalem’s engineers, so they've implemented a more elegant thermal throttling mechanism.

Rather than drop to its lowest speed, Nehalem cores have several steps through which they can step down. If a Nehalem chip starts to slowly increase in temperature, it can reduce its core frequency until the thermals are again within tolerance, and then return to maximum speed.

This means that if thermal throttling has to kick in because your core is becoming too hot, there should be a far smaller performance impact with Nehalem than with previous throttling technology. The exception will be when the CPU is massively overheating, when the core frequency of a Nehalem CPU will have to drop considerably.

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