Intel TurboStat Can Now Read CPU Temp, Wattage

Intel's TurboStat utility that's part of the Linux kernel is now capable of reading the wattage and temperature for modern Intel processors.

The Turbostat utility with the Linux 3.8 kernel will be able to read CPU temperatures for hardware that has either a Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS) or Package Thermal Monitor (PTM) hardware.

The ability to read the CPU Wattage is for CPUs from Sandy Bridge and newer that support Run-Time-Average-Power-Limiting. The RAPL feature mandates hardware energy counters and power control MSRs. These RAPL model specific registers expose system power monitoring in the form of being able to read per-core power readings as well as for the entire package/CPU. Some CPUs also expose the current Wattage of the GPU core as well. Last but not least, Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge server processors also show the DRAM DIMM Wattage through these Intel RAPL MSRs.

The power tools update for the Linux 3.8 kernel that's maintained by Len Brown of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center can be found on the kernel mailing list.