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My laptop is Dell inspiron 13 7380, a message keeps showing in system log: CPUx: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = xxx) for all cpu cores. My laptop temperature was never higher than 60C by monitoring output of sensors. Is this a driver issue or misconfiguration? How can I address this issue?

CPU: i7-8565U
OS: Arch Linux (Fully upgraded 2019-1-19)
Desktop: Gnome 3.30.2
Kernel: Linux-ck-skylake 4.20.3

user762750
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  • Is this a new issue, from a recent update or new kernel/OS? Does sensors seem to give accurate results? What program/package is monitoring & throttling the cpu, and giving the error? – Xen2050 Jan 18 '19 at 23:33
  • @Xen2050 Thanks for replying, the issue showed up a since day one. Sensors have no problems, I can feel the temperature on my laptop. The errors were generated by dmesg. – user762750 Jan 19 '19 at 01:21
  • Ok, at least it's nothing new. How does your cpu fan work? Another question here looks like it has the same message [Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled](https://superuser.com/questions/478721/package-temperature-above-threshold-cpu-clock-throttled) but it's consensus is only to fix the fans, or clean out the vents, maybe check the heat sink & paste on the (unlikely?) chance it's very old & ineffective now. And the syslog (`/var/log/syslog` ?) might have more info, some other program must be putting the error messages in dmesg. – Xen2050 Jan 19 '19 at 01:38
  • Fans work fine. The laptop was bought two month ago, it's unlikely a hardware issue or dust in heat sink. System log looks normal. – user762750 Jan 19 '19 at 06:34
  • Does the BIOS show temperatures too? Are they similar to what `sensors` shows? – Xen2050 Jan 20 '19 at 02:26
  • No problems with the sensors, it seems a skype software problem, whenever I open it, cpu usage is very high. However, after throttling, everything work normal. Any idea? – user762750 Jan 20 '19 at 13:21
  • Not too sure, if the fan's working and speeds up to max then it should be trying to cool... there could be bios settings to speed up the fan, or if the fans are controllable in linux then a program like fancontrol could tell it to speed up sooner, maybe stay a little cooler. Could still be another linux program outside the kernel monitoring temps and throttling the cpu down if it's too hot. – Xen2050 Jan 21 '19 at 08:11

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Work has just purchased a few of those laptops, and all of them have significant fan noise when asked to do just about anything. It seems to be that this CPU is designed to push its own thermal envelope with a "Max Turbo Frequency" of 4.6 GHz as standard according to Intel. From my own experience and from this reddit discussion it is unable to maintain that turbo frequency for anything other than tiny amounts of time.

This says to me that this CPU is almost always in a thermal throttle mode. As CPU designs go, I like it, basically automated overclocking. However with the chip itself only being designed for a max of 25W of heat, I've found that once cpu temperature climbs to about 60 degrees C the thermal throttling begins to scale, and then after a few seconds the fan STARTS to ramp up in speed. Combine that with what appears to be a limited ability of the Dell Inspiron 13 7380 to dissipate that heat, thermal throttling happens basically all day long for general office use, particularly if you've chosen a quiet thermal profile as that fan is annoying!

My advice, turn off or ignore those log entries and let it throttle, it seems like it is supposed to, so it can burst through short tasks. You may want to increase how often you're sampling sensors when you're testing, as there is about a 5 second long spike in temperature to 99 degrees C until the fan speeds up on our laptops.

FYI when mine is under constant load (multi-threaded file compression) and is in quiet mode, I've seen it drop down to just below 2.0 GHz. Also, I've only seen the i7-8565U listed as Whisky Lake, not Skylake, maybe there's been a kernel update since Jan you could try for that.

BeowulfNode42
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