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**dibl** · Apr 09, 2011, 02:03 PM

Re: turbo boost

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

appears to give correct information on my i7 hardware. However, note that Linux thinks there are 8 CPUs, and with SMP they don't necessarily speed up or slow down together, so you might need to fiddle with the output format to see them all.

I use a conky as a monitor for that and other functions. gkrellm might show CPU speeds too -- it's been a long while since I used it.

Hope this helps.

**PattiMichelle** · Apr 09, 2011, 02:16 PM

Re: turbo boost

Originally posted by dibl

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

appears to give correct information on my i7 hardware. However, note that Linux thinks there are 8 CPUs, and with SMP they don't necessarily speed up or slow down together, so you might need to fiddle with the output format to see them all.

I use a conky as a monitor for that and other functions. gkrellm might show CPU speeds too -- it's been a long while since I used it.

Hope this helps.

Thanks - does it show one CPU running at higher speed? When I'm running my calculation, I see one CPU at 100% duty cycle, and the others almost nothing... I'm guessing this is the condition for turboboost to kick in, but, from what I read, most tools aren't aware of turboboost's stepping of the clock speed. But there are folks spending a lot of time trying to fix that... and I'm not savvy enough to understand these things completely. For instance, turboboost is claimed to affect single threaded applications, yet OS's *always* have stuff going on in the background, so there must be threshold detectors for the other 7 CPUs. From what I saw, the latest Linux kernel(s) are now aware of this. Are you saying that cpuinfo showed one of your virtual cores running at double the clock speed as the rest? It didn't on my computer...

EDIT: Conky didn't show any increase in speed, but this may not be authoritative.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15064
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1321028

**dibl** · Apr 09, 2011, 02:38 PM

Re: turbo boost

I'm not very expert on turbo boost and CPU design, but I suspect that your process is "single threaded", meaning it is only able to run in a serial/sequential fashion. If so, then whether it is using one CPU core, or being passed around across all your CPU cores, it will still take the same amount of time and use the same number of clock cycles. Only speeding up the CPU will speed up such a process.

There still are not many packages written to take advantage of SMP-capable hardware and operating systems. devede is the only one I've observed doing real processor-sharing and parallel processing.

Also, did you install the intel-microcode and microcode-ctl packages?

**PattiMichelle** · Apr 09, 2011, 02:43 PM

Re: turbo boost

Originally posted by dibl

Also, did you install the intel-microcode and microcode-ctl packages?

Errr... no? I didn't see those mentioned in any of the references I found on *nix's usage (or not) of TurboBoost. I see them in Adept. Guess I'll try and see.

**dibl** · Apr 09, 2011, 02:52 PM

Re: turbo boost

Good. Install those, and then reboot the machine. Does your conky show all 8 CPU threads?

**PattiMichelle** · Apr 09, 2011, 03:08 PM

Re: turbo boost

Originally posted by dibl

Good. Install those, and then reboot the machine. Does your conky show all 8 CPU threads?

Thanks again for your time! Yes, I installed them - haven't rebooted yet (a calculation is running) - yes, conky shows all 8 threads, but shows 1.6GHz for all of them...

EDIT: Oops - conky doesn't show threads, but cpuinfo did...

**dibl** · Apr 09, 2011, 03:19 PM

Re: turbo boost

You can configure conky to show the 8 threads, if you want -- I have mine that way. It will also show when the clock speed changes. Of course the conky display updates are every few seconds, so it's not exactly a real time display. I'd be happy to send you my conky code if that would help.

**PattiMichelle** · Apr 09, 2011, 03:48 PM

Re: turbo boost

Originally posted by dibl

You can configure conky to show the 8 threads, if you want -- I have mine that way. It will also show when the clock speed changes. Of course the conky display updates are every few seconds, so it's not exactly a real time display. I'd be happy to send you my conky code if that would help.

OK, can't get gkrellm to display frequency - tried cpuinfo and it showed (for 7 processors) 0.933GHz, and for the 8th 1.6GHz. So it either doesn't know about turboboost or the kernel doesn't (?) For my i7 720 mobile it's supposed to turboboost to 1.6GHz, and there's no mention of 0.933 in the Intel Literature:
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43122

Edit - maybe the kernel just has the numbers wrong? (0.933 and 1.6 vs 1.6 and 2.8?)

EDIT2 - how hard is your conky code to use?

**wizard10000** · Apr 09, 2011, 04:00 PM

Re: turbo boost

Originally posted by dibl

I'm not very expert on turbo boost and CPU design...

Neither am I, but an i7's turbo boost works by increasing the speed of the core clock, of which there is only one - so all four cores would show a speed boost. Also, because of the way SMP works all cores have to be running at the same speed. ASMP - asymmetrical multiprocessing - can use processor cores of different speeds but that technology's not been implemented in ia32 or amd64 architecture - at least not in hardware available to the general public.

[/hardware geek]

edit: Attached is an Intel white paper on turbo boost and how it works. Interesting reading.

Attached Files

320354.pdf (95.7 KB, 47 views)

**dibl** · Apr 09, 2011, 04:10 PM

Re: turbo boost

@wizard that sounds about right. I see the cores all change speed at the same time, and there are several intermediate speed steps between the min and the max.

I would say conky is "hard". For me, it was an investment of an entire weekend of time before I had a handle on it and had it configured to my satisfaction (i.e. I wanted all the bells and whistles). On the other hand, that weekend was 2 years ago or more, so you only have to set it up once and then it's good forever. Matter of fact, when I built this computer in November I just grabbed my conky off my Core 2 Extreme system, and re-tweaked it for the CPU and hard drives that are in this one, and it took only 30 minutes or so to adapt it to this platform. So, it's a large one-time investment of your time, and then it's good for as long as you want it.

**dibl** · Apr 09, 2011, 04:14 PM

Re: turbo boost

Here's a screenshot -- my background image isn't helping the white text show. It's designed for a dark background and the white clouds in this one kind of wash out the white text. But you get the idea.

[img width=127 height=400]http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/5048/conky9apr2011.png[/img]

**PattiMichelle** · Apr 09, 2011, 07:13 PM

Re: turbo boost

Originally posted by dibl

Here's a screenshot -- my background image isn't helping the white text show. It's designed for a dark background and the white clouds in this one kind of wash out the white text. But you get the idea.

[img width=127 height=400]http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/5048/conky9apr2011.png[/img]

Wow! That *is* nice. I guess that must be where some of the cool screenshots I see in the themer's areas. I always wondered how they got custom things like that on their desktops. I guess Conky is more than I thought it was. What I like about it is that it isn't in a regular, decorated KDE window. You really went all out - even have the weather in there. Very Nice.

**dibl** · Apr 10, 2011, 08:52 AM

Re: turbo boost

These will get you started -- probably more than you ever wanted to know:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...32#post5452132

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=281865

(you might want to start at the last post of the second link, and browse toward the beginning)

**PattiMichelle** · Apr 10, 2011, 09:13 AM

Re: turbo boost

Wow - again! Now, how tempting is that? Thanks for the links. It looks pretty no-brainer to set up, if you have all those scripts on-hand. I couldn't seem to view the screenshot examples - I may not have registered at the ubuntu forum. I'm sure tempted to download some .rc files and start messing around - what a way to spend a day!

My main computer is now my laptop (Kubuntu10.10/OpenSuSE11/4/WIn7) - but it used to be my desktop (Opensuse 11.1). How do you maintain your setup(s) throughout the years? Do you keep a separate home partition? I tried that once with Opensuse 11.0 (I think) but some incompatabilities showed up and I had to reformat

. I had been ghosting copies of drives as backups, but now there's the Advanced Format incompatability. I guess I'm going to have to break down and set up Bacula or something.

PattiMichelle

EDIT: Pretty complicated stuff! I fiddled a bit with one of the .conkyrc (the last one in that 1200-entry thread!) and got something on my screen, but it is kind of a space-hog and windows were under it, plus I don't think I have fonts, etc. - I thought the Kubuntu repo package had everyting, but apparently not. Have a great Sunday!

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