CPU temperature is higher in Ubuntu than in Mac OS

[Adam Dingle]

I'm running Ubuntu 13.10 on a MacBookPro9,1. On this machine the CPU temperature is significantly hotter in Ubuntu than in Mac OS. I ran the following experiment, measuring the temperature in both operating systems when the system had been idle for several minutes: I was sitting at the desktop not running any applications in particular.

In Mac OS, Temperature Monitor (http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html) reported these temperatures:

CPU Core 1: 53 degrees C
CPU Core 2: 54 degrees C
CPU Core 3: 46 degrees C
CPU Core 5: 46 degrees C
CPU Core 7: 51 degrees C

The observed range is 46-54 degrees.

In Ubuntu, the 'sensors' command-line program reports

Core 0: +64.0 degrees C
Core 1: +58.0 degrees C
Core 2: +59.0 degrees C
Core 3: +61.0 degrees C

The observed range is 58-64 degrees, about 10 degrees hotter than in Mac OS.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

By the way, I haven't installed macfanctld, and perhaps that would let me achieve a cooler temperature. But I think that the Ubuntu default install should run with a similar CPU temperature as Mac OS, for the health of the system and for the comfort of the user. One fix might be to install macfanctld by default on Macs if that's the best way to accomplish this.