Are all cores unlocked?

[JD]

On 09/22/2010 10:56 AM, Kenneth Marcy wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2010, JD<jd1008 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> On my notebook, which has an old 2.2 GHz athlon65 uniicore (3700+),
> cpuinfo shows cpu MHz as 798.103
>
> OK
>
> Does that mean that as I am typing this message, the cpu is running
> at only 790MHz??
>
> Approximately, yes. Your machine is also not discharging its battery quite so fast, nor is it generating more heat unnecessarily for the modest level of CPU activity you are now requesting of the machine.
>
> How an I speed it up?
>
> Ask the CPU to do more work. Recalculate a large spreadsheet. Spell-check a long document. Do a database lookup. Better yet, do them all at the same time. If your bandwidth, as opposed to the machine's, isn't interested in all that excitement, but you still want to exercise the processor more, find some program to run in the background while you do less compute-intensive tasks. For example, you could join the folding at home project:

I ran a super cpu hog: celestia. Cput utilization reached 99.9% and 
stayed there.
In a terminal window, I ran this shell:

while true; do
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep  -i mhz
sleep 3
done

The speed stayed at 790MHz.

I think there must be something wrong with speed-step
or somehow, the bios does not update this value (I  understand
that cpuinfo is populated by calls to bios).

I wish I could find a program that could actually
test the cpu MHz  by timing, in a loop, a complex
set of instructions which would be an average
representation of the machine's instructions used
by apps and kernel. I am not sure if such a program
exists. The old "mips" calculation programs do not
work on modern architectures.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
>
> Or you could just be content that your computer knows how to run in an idle mode instead of racing around at top speed when it doesn't have anything to compute at the moment (which is most of the time, usually).
>
> One of the larger challenges of contemporary computer science is to figure out how to use, most efficiently and effectively, the multiple processor resources now more commonly available. Software has to be made aware of how to best use the newer hardware, and this is a non-trivial task.
>
>
> Ken