Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 19:27:13 -0500 From: Mike Jakubik <mikej@rogers.com> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: powerd effectiveness Message-ID: <43C5A261.1020407@rogers.com>
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It seems that powerd does very little in terms of reducing heat, and sacrifices performance while doing so. Am i wrong to assume that lowering the cpu's frequency should reduce consumed power, and therefore reduce the amount of heat produced? I have tested with mbmon and i see no difference between an idle system running with powerd at 75mhz, and at full rate without. Also, while testing the speed of a php script, i found myself refreshing it quickly in the browser to see the results of the timers. I was getting sporadic results, on an otherwise idle system. I noticed that if anything cpu intensive ran in the background, my script would execute quicker. I disabled powerd and restored the frequency, at this point i got more consistent results, and the script would execute over 100msec faster. It seems like its not adjusting the clock fast enough. Are these problems with powerd or just my hardware? It is an old athlon system, running on the via133 chipset . --- CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) Processor (1210.79-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x642 Stepping = 2 Features=0x183f9ff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR> AMD Features=0xc0440800<SYSCALL,<b18>,MMX+,3DNow+,3DNow> real memory = 536788992 (511 MB) avail memory = 520237056 (496 MB) npx0: [FAST] npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface acpi0: <ASUS A7V> on motherboard acpi0: Power Button (fixed) Timecounter "ACPI-fast" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000 acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0xe408-0xe40b on acpi0 cpu0: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0 acpi_throttle0: <ACPI CPU Throttling> on cpu0 acpi_button0: <Power Button> on acpi0 pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0 pci0: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib0 pcib1: <PCI-PCI bridge> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib1 isab0: <PCI-ISA bridge> at device 4.0 on pci0 isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0 atapci0: <VIA 82C686A UDMA66 controller> port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xd800-0xd80f at device 4.1 on pc
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