On Sep 22, 2010, JD <jd1008(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On my notebook, which has an old 2.2 GHz athlon65 uniicore (3700+),
cpuinfo shows cpu MHz as 798.103
OK
Does that mean that as I am typing this message, the cpu is running
at only 790MHz??
Approximately, yes. Your machine is also not discharging its battery quite so fast, nor is
it generating more heat unnecessarily for the modest level of CPU activity you are now
requesting of the machine.
How an I speed it up?
Ask the CPU to do more work. Recalculate a large spreadsheet. Spell-check a long document.
Do a database lookup. Better yet, do them all at the same time. If your bandwidth, as
opposed to the machine's, isn't interested in all that excitement, but you still
want to exercise the processor more, find some program to run in the background while you
do less compute-intensive tasks. For example, you could join the folding@home project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
Or you could just be content that your computer knows how to run in an idle mode instead
of racing around at top speed when it doesn't have anything to compute at the moment
(which is most of the time, usually).
One of the larger challenges of contemporary computer science is to figure out how to use,
most efficiently and effectively, the multiple processor resources now more commonly
available. Software has to be made aware of how to best use the newer hardware, and this
is a non-trivial task.
Ken