detecting overheating processors?

[Kenneth Culver]

Quoting Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk>:

> In message <1942228052.20040302193211 at andric.com>, Dimitry Andric writes:
>
>>> I would prefer to have a program called "stress" which could be run
>>> at any time to test hardware.
>>
>> It's called "make buildworld". ;)
>
> In fact it isn't (anymore).
>
> I've seen modern hardware run buildworld for days, but explode on
> scientific FP work in a few minutes.
>
> It used to be the case that buildworld would stress a CPU, but with
> all the specialty circuitry put into CPUs these days, buildworld
> probably ends up using the MMX and SSE extension silicon as a
> heatsink.
>
> A real stress-test would be something which engages bus-interface,
> integer, floating point and preferably any "extensions" as well.

One decent benchmark for me has been encoding from mpeg2 to mpeg4 using
mencoder. If you run one process using MMX/SSE/whatever and the other forced to
normal FP, you can test all the different execution units at once doing this.
I've had times where I had my memory timings set too agressively in BIOS, where
make buildworld wouldn't cause any problems, but using a couple of mencoders at
once along with a buildworld would make the machine die. :-)

Ken