Frequency scaling survey

[Owen Townend]

2008/11/20 Slim Joe <slimjoe2k8 at gmail.com>:
> 2008/11/19, Owen Townend <owen.townend at gmail.com>:
>
> Thanks again to all the replied.
>
> [...]
>
>> Work comp:
>>
>> % cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name'
>> model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E8400  @ 3.00GHz
>> model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E8400  @ 3.00GHz
>> % cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
>> 3000000 2667000 2333000 2000000
>> 3000000 2667000 2333000 2000000
>
> The results look strange. Does this mean that you can't throttle the
> E8400 to less than 2GHz?

Looks that way unfortunately.  My work box has a fresh install of
Intrepid and those are the available frequencies it found.

[snip 4850e results]
>
> I know xHz isn't everything when it comes to performance or power saving.
> However, I was hoping to get results from a processor that can reduce its
> speed down to Pentium II levels. I remember reading an article on FreeBSD
> that shows the list of available frequencies going all the way down to
> ~300MHz.

Depending on your actual needs when the processor _is_ doing something
you can underclock the processor to scale both the maximum and minimum
available frequencies down.

cheers,
Owen.