Patent ID: 7313709

Claim:
A method of estimating dissipation of heat in an electrical circuit comprising a microprocessor which includes an execution unit and a thermal execution unit, said method, comprising: using a thermal instruction appended to an instruction to be processed to determine a heat load associated with said instruction; and multiplying, at an instruction rate, a value of the heat load generated by an instruction, by a value representing an occurrence of said instruction to obtain a product, and adding the product to a running sum of heat generated previously wherein the thermal execution unit decodes said thermal instruction appended to said instruction and keeps a running sum of heat being generated by a current instruction stream, wherein said thermal execution unit comprises a multiplier and an adder, wherein on every instruction cycle, in said thermal execution unit, said multiplier multiplies N bits of said thermal instruction with N entries of a thermal table to produce a product, and said adder adds said product to a running sum of a thermal meter of said thermal execution unit, and wherein said thermal execution unit comprises a thermal meter per execution unit.