In a computer system, a device for measuring power dissipation (e.g., using on-die thermal sensors) is linked to both a hardware-based thermal management solution and with a means for causing a notification event to software, so that, initially, the operating system software and/or the application software modifies its behavior in response to the notification event to reduce overall system power dissipation and the hardware-based thermal management solution is only triggered if the software solution is not effective; with both operating system and application software resuming higher-performance algorithms when power dissipation is no longer critical.