man stress-ng gives the list of possible --cpu-method. It documents matrixprodas:
matrix product of two 128 × 128 matrices of double floats. Testing on 64 bit x86 hardware shows that this is provides agood mix of memory, cache and floating point operations and is probably the best CPU method to use to make a CPU run hot.
If you don't specify the --cpu-method it apparently loops through every method one by one.