Thank you for your assistance. It may be that you and HWMonitor's developer have the correct information.
As noted in my signature, my motherboard is the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula. My desire is to understand the complexities and full functionality of the system I built, including the CPU, so that I operate it within safe limits and avoid premature failure of the components. In that regard, I reviewed a couple of AMD Phenom CPU manuals. The following information stirred my excitement:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... tures.aspx
Last Updated
1/20/2010
Article Number
CPU-10
Troubleshooting:
If the system is not experiencing any instability, it is possible that the utility used to measure the temperature of the processor is inaccurate. The following troubleshooting suggestions can help determine if the issue is related to the temperate monitoring utility:
1. Determine how the utility obtains the processor’s temperature
Utilities that monitor the processors temperature can obtain the measurement in several different ways: through thermal sensors on the motherboard or digital temperature signals (DTS) on the processor. If a motherboard uses thermal sensors to obtain the processor’s temperature, depending on where the thermal sensor is placed, the temperature reading can be inaccurate.
. . * For best results, use a monitoring utility that extracts the temperature reading from DTS
I also reviewed the document at
http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/43375.pdf.
In those studies and in addition to the above DTS information, I discovered there are certain instructions that will dump various information about the CPU into registers. I also installed and reviewed AMD Overdrive, which reveals a lot of information about the CPU, motherboard, memory, etc. and allows tweaking, such as the multipliers of individual cores. So, with the ability to tweak individual cores and track individual core speeds, it seems only logical that individual temperatures should be readable. However, I was not able to find such information and it appears that AMD engineers have not considered that with the ability to set individual core multipliers different from each other the heat buildup within each core also will be different. Since I do not know the physical location and proximity of all the cores, I am unable to know whether that is true or whether they directly influence each other and produce an average CPU temperature. It does seem that is indicated by the above statement of singularity: "extracts
the temperature reading from DTS." Nonetheless, I am left confused by the above statement of multiplicity: "digital temperature
signals (DTS) on the processor." I will leave that to you technicians because I must get back to completing my bachelor degree.
Again, thank you for your time and all of your effort on my behalf.
Best wishes,
James