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
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.
