Tech: Intel CPUs

Jul 05, 2012 16:15

Does anyone understand Intel CPUs?


My new laptop has an i5 processor in it which is a 2 core device which should be running at roughly 2.5GHz speed. Except that everything tells me it has four cores...I found one Intel web page which says it has 4 threads. I am not too familiar with threads on a CPU. I used to have pipelining on ARM chips 20 years ago... but that isn't really the same thing. And then I noticed something weird in the system information....

-Processors-
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz : 800.00MHz
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz : 800.00MHz
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz : 2501.00MHz
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz : 800.00MHz

It is almost like one core is running at full speed, and the other core is split up in three doing time based multiplexing. Weird. I wonder  what the benefit of that is...

Now if I look at /proc/cpuinfo they are all 800MHz.... Hmmm

alex@leguin:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz
cpu MHz : 800.000
cpu MHz : 800.000
cpu MHz : 800.000
cpu MHz : 800.000

tech, linux

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