for all the times that I wanted to make my TR3 slow down, I could never get it slower than 595MHz while on battery cpu and cpu to minimum, but yesterday, I got it down to 130MHz, I’ll post the picture tomarrow (when I go back to school). Settings were adaptive cpu and cpu fan to minimum. (it was plugged in too). Now, to test this setting whilst it is running off of battery power.

From what I understand, the Pentium M only drops to as slow as 600MHz. If you’re using Windows’ built in System properties tool I can guarantee you that it’s inaccurate.

What are you using to check the clock speed? Some programs may misread the CPU speed if they don’t understand the Pentium M processor.

um, I right click on “my computer” to get the system properties

Ah, ok, that thing is pretty much inaccurate and doesn’t always get the processor frequency correct…especially dynamically changing ones.

Download this and run the wcpuclk.exe program within it. It will give you a realtime reading of your CPU speed. As you will notice…it will never dip below 600Mhz (+/- 5Mhz).

It does look like it’s 2 steps…600Mhz and whatever. However, it does have intermediate frequencies between 600Mhz and the maximum clock speed. This happens because the Pentium M and supporting chipset can change the FSB and voltage on the fly creating as performance is needed. So, the CPU may hit 800Mhz for example but only for a split second as it ramps up to the full speed of the processor.

Hmmm, I’m a little suprised you guys missed this.

The M scales from ‘around’ 100MHZ to the upper limit ((900Mhz for my Tr1). This is called ‘dynaminc speedstep’, as opposed to regular speedstep which is just the two settings you mentioned: 600MHZ and 900mhz, or the particular upper limit for the model you have)

You will need a cpu meter that will read this process. Most do. You also need to be in the ‘ultimate battery’ mode, and not on AC.

When dynamic speedstep is active, the M behaves much like the Crusoe ‘longrun’, dymanically changing the freq as demanded. The main difference between the M dynaminc speedstep and the Crusoe longrun, is that the M chip tends to lock in at 600Mhz with some types of apps. The Crusoe will never do this.

When the poster above hit ‘My computer’ to get the CPU speed he did get the correct speed. This is essentially a snatpshot of the CPu freq, and will vary widely when dynamic speedstep is active.

(also works like this for the Crusoe longrun)

There’s no mistake here, test it yourselves.

Yes, I understand that it’s more dynamic that the earlier implementations…but if you read Intel’s own datasheets on the Pentium M processor, you can see what the exact operating points are…

ftp://download.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/30218903.pdf

See page 22 for the table that shows the exact points and how much voltage they require. You’ll notice that it drops only to 600Mhz. I’m thinking that because parts of the CPU can shutdown as well as the FSB that CPU reading programs may get an inaccurate reading of the actual CPU frequency. For instance, it may be obtaining the frequency by multiplying the FSB and the current clock multiplier. If the FSB is in a low power state while the reading is being taken then it’s possible for it to be off.

From what I understand, “dynamic Speedstep” is simply the newer ability to switch from High to Low performance modes actively. Previous SpeedStep implementations basically meant that High performance was plugged in and Low performance was on battery mode and you didn’t have much control over it.

Of course, I could still be wrong but I haven’t seen any support documentation from Intel to say the contrary.  :?