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

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.