Re: 1.7GHz CPU running at 599MHz, FSB (only?) running at 99.9MHz

Comments inline:

On 7/6/06, Jones, John (US) <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The clock speed is variable and cycles down to save power/heat.  Pretty
much all notebooks and a moderate number of desktops do this nowadays.
Intel used to market this as "SpeedStep".  599MHz (probably supposed to
be 600) is probably the minimum for a lightly loaded machine.  Cooling
fans and some other system components can also dynamically adjust their
performance to reduce power consumption & heat generation.

IMO, when the Thinkpad is docked at work, it should be running full tilt, or
at least respond immediately to a demand.

IMHO it's none of the app's business what speed chip it's running on;

adequate performance is up to the user (and their budget) to determine
unless it's really timing dependent (manages controller interfaces or
whatever).  Anyway, I'd be talking to the vendor about how their program
doesn't understand 7 year old PC technology (variable speed CPUs).  If
they'd read the CPU ID via system call or measure CPU speed under a
stress test they'd find the real potential CPU speed.  Also, MHz aren't
the only factor nowadays.  As we all know from the iSeries, cache
size/speed make a huge difference and the PentiumMs come with up to 2MB
cache.  Cache, or the lack of, is still the main reason why Celeron CPUs
stink despite relatively decent clock speeds.

What's interesting about the DOC1 application error this morning is that I
was using it yesterday, and it hadn't reported a problem with the CPU speed;
perhaps it was already running a higher clock speed?  This morning, DOC1 was
the first app I opened up.  Yesterday, I probably already had Lotus Notes
and Firefox running.

I understand your opinion that the app shouldn't care about the chip's
speed, that's my take on it too, but I wonder if a chip can be too slow that
could cause an app to fail?  Frankly, the performance of this app,
*especially* when loading a form, is glaringly slow on this system, and I'd
hate to see it on a slower box.  I also wouldn't mind maxxing out the RAM on
this, currently it has 1GB.

 L1 Data Cache = 32 KBytes
 L1 Instruction Cache = 32 KBytes
 L2 Cache = 2048 KBytes

The FSB may be 100MHz but it is likely double or quad-pumped; i.e. at

100MHz it's bandwidth is probably 200 or 400 Mb/sec.

A few Google results mentioned this too, but I need to study up on this to
understand it better.  I just want to make certain that the Thinkpad is
running at full tilt when applications demand it.

My Dell, BTW, has the 2GHz PentiumM with 2MB cache and it's plenty fast.


Ditto here, I have zero complaints about speed and response when not
considering the DOC1 app.  Well, ok, Lotus Notes is a pig too, but I can
avoid using that for the most part.

- Dan