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bwat47

Member

Registered: 2009-10-07

Posts: 638

[SOLVED] cpupower max freq 1.7ghz on 2.5ghz processor?

I have a 2.5ghz i5-3210. cpupower reports that with the ondemand governor the frequency "should be within" 1.20 and 1.7ghz. Is this normal?
here's the cpupower output:

I'm not using anything that tries to mess with frequency scaling such as laptop-mode-tools.

[brandon@arch-lemu4 ~]$ cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1 2 3
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
  hardware limits: 1.20 GHz - 2.50 GHz
  available frequency steps: 2.50 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.30 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 2.10 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.90 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.50 GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.30 GHz, 1.20 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: ondemand, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.20 GHz and 1.70 GHz.
                  The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 1.20 GHz.
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes
    25500 MHz max turbo 4 active cores
    25500 MHz max turbo 3 active cores
    25500 MHz max turbo 2 active cores
    25500 MHz max turbo 1 active cores
[brandon@arch-lemu4 ~]$ 

EDIT: Upon further inspection. after a reboot it works fine and says it should be in between 1.20 and 2.50. However as soon as I go onto battery power it limits it to 1.70. This wouldn't bother me, however sometimes when I plug it back in it gets "stuck" with a max of 1.70 (although most of the time it goes back to a max of 2.50).

EDIT2: appears to be expected behavior for system76 laptops: https://bugs.launchpad.net/system76/+bug/781423. occasionally getting stuck when plugged into AC is probably a stupid bios bug.

Last edited by bwat47 (2013-04-03 02:24:01)