CPU temp's on core 2 duo, should they be significantly different?

[Derek Ragona]

At 02:06 PM 6/23/2008, George Hartzell wrote:

>DA Forsyth recently mentioned the coretemp driver, which fetches the
>core temperatures for Core 2 Duo chips.
>
>I'm in the middle of building up a Shuttle SG31G2 (7-STABLE) and
>loaded the driver to see what it told me.
>
>I've noticed that cpu.0 is consistently hotter than cpu.1, even on an
>unloaded machine.  Is that because that core's doing housekeeping work
>whilst the other is truly idle?
>
>dev.cpu.0.temperature: 44
>dev.cpu.1.temperature: 29
>
>If I background a pair of "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null" so that
>the cpu's are busy, both go up but cpu.0 stays hotter.
>
>I'm asking because I'm worried that this could be a sign that I didn't
>get the heatsink goop spread out sufficiently well....
>
>Thanks,
>
>g.

Not sure if the core duos work the same as older 2 CPU and 4 CPU 
motherboards, but there are some BIOS functions that always use the first 
CPU.  So you never get true SMP because the hardware uses the first CPU 
more to service interrupts.

         -Derek

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