151–160 of 181 posts
I think Apple's approach of attributing the capacity not available due to throttling (or various other reasons) to kernel_task might be the best. You can tell something is eating cpu, stuff isn't just stuck at 50% while the rest of the system looks idle. Although then you have users trying to figure out how to kill kernel_task, which isn't great either...
Power saving and "throttling" (usually it's un-turboing) are different cases that shouldn't be conflated; in one case the processor could run faster but in the other it can't. Ultimately we may want different metrics depending on what they're going to be used for. If you calculate relative to base frequency you will get utilization over 100% which is going to confuse some people. Linux has done some work in this area…
MacOS has a weird solution to throttling. They put a fake process in the process list which looks like it consuming x% of the resources but really it is just blocking some usage to allow the CPU to cool.
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> However, when the CPU's speed has been reduced because it's too hot … Maybe just measure overall system load as current CPU temperature as a percentage of maximum?
That's a decent method for some purposes, though it's not without its own flaws. For systems using integrated graphics or any laptop, the CPU's thermals are intertwined with the GPU's. You may also have a workload that sends a CPU core to its highest stable clock speed and safe voltage, but is still cooled well enough that the CPU doesn't get close to its temperature limits. Or you could have a situation where the CP…
I've never used a mobile device that seemed to have such considerations. They all seem perfectly happy to make their surface scalding hot. Do manufacturers actually care about this?
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Names are words.
No, names can consist of more than one word. "New York City" for example is three words making up one name.
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Counterpoint - during typical (consumer) usage hardware spends most of the time idle. Hardware capable of sustaining the maximum workload indefinitely is likely to have a lower maximum in practice. Unsustainable bursts are likely to provide higher overall performance for typical workloads, so it makes sense to optimize the hardware design for those.
I guess, but workstation class laptops still overheat, so again, piss poor design.
Throttling should show up as a pseudo-process, "consuming" peak performance.
The downside is of course, that users see this process name chewing up 500%+ of CPU, google "kernel_task cpu", and find the commands to disable the thermal throttling to "fix" the issue!
https://eclecticlight.co/2019/02/25/playing-with-fire-dealin...
A key problem with this proposal is that modern CPUs do not have a single definitive maximum frequency. You have the base frequency which is rarely relevant outside of synthetic workloads then you have a variety of turbo frequencies which interact in complex ways. AMD's latest CPUs don't even have clear upper bounds on their frequency scaling logic. It's a big black box and the results can vary depending on the workl…
CPU usage is an incredibly complex metric that doesn't really explain what is actually going on. I noticed while running a benchmark I can get my CPU to 50c and 100% usage and it stays steady like that. But then I tried prime95 and my cpu very quickly hit 99c also at 100%. Likely the different benchmarks were both running as fast as they can but the prime95 one ran on a faster part of the cpu which could generate mor…
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No, names can consist of more than one word. "New York City" for example is three words making up one name.
New York City is a proper noun and can for grammatical purposes be considered one word. It's not as clear cut as programmers would like to believe. https://www.quora.com/Are-names-considered-words?share=1
A key problem with this proposal is that modern CPUs do not have a single definitive maximum frequency. You have the base frequency which is rarely relevant outside of synthetic workloads then you have a variety of turbo frequencies which interact in complex ways. AMD's latest CPUs don't even have clear upper bounds on their frequency scaling logic. It's a big black box and the results can vary depending on the workl…
By this proposal's logic, it would make total sense for processes on a boosting CPU core to report more than 100% cpu usage.
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.res...
> The percentage specifies how much CPU time the unit shall get at maximum, relative to the total CPU time available on one CPU. Use values > 100% for allotting CPU time on more than one CPU.