On a 2011 17" MacBook Pro (i7, 10.6, 16GB ram) I do not have any options in the energy saver preference panel to control CPU throttling. I need to be able to disable CPU throttling for short periods of time – or at least force OS X to a certain state and stay there so that I can get consistent results from test to test in a performance comparison situation.
Are there methods or apps that allow me to control the energy saver features and particularly CPU throttling and CPU disabling for recent (sandy bridge) Macs?
CHUD does not appear to support this machine (it doesn't correctly report the CPU type) and while I can manually disable hyperthreading and processor cores using /Library/Application Support/HWPrefs/CPUPalette.app it doesn't give me the option to tell OS X not to throttle anything.
Best Answer
This particular machine is a second generation Core i7, which includes Intel's Turbo Boost technology.
This is, essentially, a power management processor that has the ability to change the clock speed and disable/enable processor cores on the fly. It requires no software intervention, the entire algorithm exists in silicon on the i7 processor itself.
While utilities to control it are starting to appear for windows, Apple doesn't provide a method to disable it, nevermind control it, and I have not yet found any utilities that would allow me to disable or control it on OS X.
So, at this point, the answer is that you cannot disable CPU throttling or power control under OS X for Turbo Boost capable processors - it's all automated inside the processor, and Apple doesn't have a public API to control it.