On 09/22/2010 10:56 AM, Kenneth Marcy wrote: > On Sep 22, 2010, JD<jd1...@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 fold...@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/fold...@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 -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
