Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Re: Nonetheless I stated Tcase max was a fixed value thus your argument earlier, of Tcase max varying as power dissipation increases for a given cpu, becomes flawed as quite obviously the Tcase max mentioned in Table 9 and Note 2 are exactly the same thing whatever its interpretation

Ok, you need to bring things all together here.

The Tcase,max value programmed into Opteron is to assist 3rd parties to develop BIOS routines to act as thermal trips if the processor temperature exceeds this value.

#msg-8712112

Obviously, the temperature of an Opteron chip is going to vary depending on the application load. Tcase,max is the max allowable before THERMTRIP needs to be asserted, but the actual CPU temperature will be something between ambient and this number.

Because it varies, some systems designers may want to know what the processor power dissipation is relative to the temperature of the CPU. That's when they use Table 9, as I explained here:

#msg-8711324

So, to summarize, the Opteron processor will vary in power dissipation depending on the load of application software being run. To find out the power dissipation based on the temperature, you look at table 9. The Tcase,max is the maximum temperature before the THERMTRIP register is tripped, and hopefully, system builders will use an appropriate thermal profile when designing their systems, so that the power dissipation of Opteron will never reach the point where it produces a temperature exceeding Tcase,max.

Does this help?