Are all cores unlocked?

[Michael Miles]

JD wrote:
>
> 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
>>      
In the Bios check your C2 or C3 and make sure it is disabled.
Also Cool and Quiet needs to be turned off.


I hate that feature as my rig is at 100% load on all 4 cores 24/7 . 
(Seti at home)
That's one thing very nice about this processor (Phenom II 965 @ 3.6) is 
I do not even realize that it is under 100% load all the time.



I can't wait to see the Bulldozer series in action ( 16 cores 
Hyperthreaded) yeah baby..........