On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, Amit Kulkarni wrote:
Never know what they can do. But the current max is 6 GHz by IBM for
any core, right? :)
That case was the source of my doubts if 9.9 GHz "is enough for
everybody".
The majority of current hardware do per core frequency scaling (or
bursting), but hw.cpuspeed is reporting the BIOS CPU speed
(considering over and under clocking) for each core before the scaling
happens, right?
The opposite is true, it reports the current clock speed and therefore my
patch suggestion. Otherwise you, Toby and others are right about new
individually clocked cores, but the change should go much deeper to the
OS, involving kernel and respective part of sysctl interface in the first
place.
So going forward with such complicated CPU designs, top will lie or be
misleading. What about 64+ cores (OpenBSD supports 64 cores!) and many
of them idle with low frequencies? How do you display them?
Regards,
David
