THERMAL MITIGATION SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS

A system for performing thermal mitigation in a multi-core processor determines which processing core(s) of the processor is responsible for causing the temperature to rise to an undesired level and then performs one or more thermal mitigation steps only in the responsible core to avoid degrading performance of the other cores. The system monitors digital activity (DA) of the pipeline stages of the cores, determines when the DA of a processing stage has caused temperature to rise to a particular level and then reduces the DA of at least one processing stage of the responsible core in order to reduce temperature. The system can also take one or more other thermal mitigation steps based on monitored temperature values, such as reducing clock frequency or selecting a different V/F corner of the responsible core.