Spurious thermal shutdowns on Dell Studio 1557

[Dana Myers]

On 4/4/2010 8:53 AM, Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:
>
>> Theoretically, your laptop should be able to run with CPU stuck at
>> its highest frequency without shutting down.
>
> I agree. This is precisely what I am trying to achieve.

[Coming into this thread late]

Why do you think that's true?  While this is desirable, it's
certainly possible that the machine was built with a thermal
design that is unable to achieve this, and depends on
software to reduce CPU P-state to avoid shut-down.

One example I've seen is the Acer Ferrari 3400, which would
run the CPU at P0 (full clock rate) by default, but after a
few minutes of aggressive use (like, building a kernel), would
drop the highest CPU state to P1 (10% slower) via a GPE.  This
notebook simply can't run the CPU at a full clock rate load
for more than a few minutes before it overheats, apparently
by design.

Thermal design in notebooks seems to be quite tricky.

Dana