Odd /proc/cpuinfo

[Roberto Ragusa]

Suvayu Ali wrote:
> On Monday 11 January 2010 10:40 AM, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>>          model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.40GHz
>>          cpu MHz         : 2400.000
> 
> That is not odd. This is a feature of most modern CPUs. Whenever the CPU 
> is under minimal load, the clock speed drops down to a lower value to 
> save power. I believe you can turn this feature on/off from the BIOS. 
> The latest models can do this even more flexibly, AFAICR they call it 
> dynamic overclocking (or underclocking in this case).

Try opening a konsole and running this:

  while true; do true; done

then check cpuinfo again. :-)

If you have many processors or multicore CPUs you may need
one of those loops for every core. When you ask all of them
to work hard, they increase the clock.

You have to Control-c the infinite loop of course, if you
do not want to waste power (or battery) while doing nothing
useful. :-)

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it