Compact thermal models and modeling strategies are today a cornerstone for advanced power management to counteract the emerging thermal crisis for many-core systems-on-chip. System identification techniques allow to extract models directly from the target device thermal response. Unfortunately, standard Least Squares techniques cannot effectively cope with both model approximation and measurement noise typical of real systems. In this work, we present a novel distributed identification strategy capable of coping with real-life temperature sensor noise and effectively extracting a set of low-order predictive thermal models for the tiles of Intel's Single-chip-Cloud-Computer (SCC) many-core prototype.