Potential HW failure early warning?

[osxinu]

I have a 17" Macbook Pro Late 2011 2.5G 16G OWC mem otherwise stock.
I noticed the fans pick speed for no reason and activity mon listed "powerd" using 100% of a core.
Restarted with the same problem.
Shutdown with lid open and it restarted immediately after (I have lidwake disabled because of problem with magnets in screen bezel) that should not happen.
Tried killing powerd but keepalive is true in launchd powerd plist.
Reset SMC and restarted and powerd still eating up a core.
Started up from an external backup system and problem persisted.
System disk back internal.
Removed magsafe and shutdown (didn't immediately auto restart) and reset SMC, restarted.
A few minutes later after restart from shutdown powerd was back to normal.
If it happens again I think I will set the powerd.pilst keepalive to false and see what happens. Obviously there will be consequences doing this.

Should I be concerned about this incident? My warranty will expire soon and if it aint broke apple can't fix.
Anyone have similar problems or ideas about the nature of the problem?

Thx

 

[T5BRICK]

Sounds more like a software issue to me.

 

[osxinu]

Sounds more like a software issue to me.

Thanks, I would like it to be SW but when I booted off a backup Lion made just after purchased new the problem persisted. The power daemon that monitors system state and throttles CPU according was running wild on 2 different system disks which makes me lean towards hardware.

 

[Mrbobb]

using 100% of a core.

When this happens the procesees window should show who's (software) culprit.

Agree software.

A clean re-install maybe in the near future.

 

[osxinu]

When this happens the procesees window should show who's (software) culprit.

Agree software.

A clean re-install maybe in the near future.

The software culprit is "powerd". I booted from a clean install and the problem remained. As well I killed the software culprit and it was relaunched still consuming a core. launchd will keep it alive.