Performance analysis of a high-end CPU under a heavy computational load and varying RAM amount using thermal imaging techniques

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of different RAM amounts on the CPU surface temperature distribution while operating under a heavy computational load. Two experiments corresponding to different RAM amounts were carried out under relatively poor cooling conditions. A personal computer with a high-end Intel Pentium IV CPU was used to conduct the experiments. The computational load was the multiplication of two dimensional matrices (6000 by 6000) containing double precision numbers. In order to monitor temperature distributions, a high resolution thermal imaging camera was utilized. A data acquisition system was interfaced with the camera to acquire thermal images of CPU at pre-defined computational stages. The analysis of the thermal images showed that the CPU surface temperature increases as more RAM becomes available to perform the computation. The surface temperature distribution was used to identify the location of possible hotspots on the CPU