CPU frequency accessible through smbios interface?

CPU frequency accessible through smbios interface?

[Erik Slagter]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 920 bytes --]

Hi,

Just a thought I had. It appears that my brand new P915D only supports
two frequencies it runs on, giving me only 10 watts of powersaving.

My motherboard, on the other hand, has a nice bios setup that allows me
to set the clock frequency of the CPU to anything between 1.4 Ghz and
4.0 Ghz in steps of 0.1 Ghz. I checked the impact of this to the power
dissipation. It appears that setting the frequency to 1.4 Ghz (half of
its design frequency) saves 30-40 watts instead of the lousy 10 watts.

Drawback of course is that half of the capacity isn't used...

Now, I was hoping if anyone has ever heard of a smbios call or something
like that to set the motherboard's cpu frequency. If such a thing exists
(even if only for my motherboard), I could come up with an interface
between cpufreq and the smbios and I would be very happy ;-)

But probably it's all proprietary, but, one never knows... 

[-- Attachment #1.2: smime.p7s --]
[-- Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature, Size: 2771 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 147 bytes --]

_______________________________________________
Cpufreq mailing list
Cpufreq@lists.linux.org.uk
http://lists.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/cpufreq

Re: CPU frequency accessible through smbios interface?

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 08:03:41PM +0200, Erik Slagter wrote:
 
 > But probably it's all proprietary, but, one never knows... 

Sadly, this usually is, so unless you have uber reverse engineering
skills, don't expect to see it working.

Also, it's likely it's also adjusting the FSB to offer such
a wide scale of frequencies.  Adjusting the FSB at runtime is
an absolute nightmare to get right.

		Dave
-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk