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Re: CPU Frequency -- min save value?



Jochen Voss <voss@seehuhn.de> writes:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 12:40:27PM +0930, John Steele Scott wrote:
>> cpufreq drivers for ppc only support two speeds at the moment. So if you ask
>> for 200MHz, it will still give you 750MHz.
> I think that this is a hardware property of the CPU and not a property
> of the driver (at least for the 7447A CPU).  So it will ever be only
> two frequencies.

Aye, this is correct, but it is also true that most of these chips have a
feature called instruction cache throttling. When this is enabled, you can
achieve effective frequencies as low as slow_freq/N, where N is between 2 and
256. The CPU is still clocked at the same frequency, but the instruction cache
only gives a real instruction every Nth clock cycle. The rest of the time the
CPU is executing NOPs, so many of the functional units will be powered down.

cheers,

John

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