Power limits keep climbing. AI accelerators already push past 1,000 watts in some configurations. Data centers face ballooning electricity bills. Against that backdrop, Intel has introduced a modest but telling refinement in how its processors handle heat alerts. The change appears in recent Linux kernel patches. Engineers at Intel prepared the kernel’s thermal driver to support directed package thermal interrupts. Phoronix first reported the patches in March 2026 . Instead of blasting every core in a multi-core package with the same signal, the hardware can now route the interrupt to a single designated handler. One core opts in. The rest stay undisturbed. Why does this matter? Broadcast interrupts create unnecessary overhead. All cores wake. They compete for a shared lock. Idle cores lose sleep cycles. The patch series explains the problem clearly. “Package-level thermal interrupts are currently broadcast to all CPUs in a package. Only one CPU is needed to service package-wide events.…