Intel Turbo Boost – How to Check if Turbo Boost is Working

intelturbo-boost

I recently purchased a laptop with a sandy bridge CPU that is supposed to have turbo boost. Is turbo boost supported in 11.04? How can I tell if it's working?

I tried this but it seems to only detect Nehalem CPUs.

Best Answer

11.04 runs the 2.6.38 kernel which is supposed to work well with Sandy Bridge CPUs.

You can open a terminal and run grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo. Then open a second terminal tab and run a loop like while :; do :; done. In the first terminal, run grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo again. You should see one of the cores has a higher frequency now:

$ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo 
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cpu MHz         : 3701.000
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cpu MHz         : 1600.000

You can also try powertop and turbostat from the linux-tools-common package (run sudo modprobe msr before sudo turbostat). The Git version of i7z is supposed to work for Sandy Bridge (and it works for me with a desktop i7).

Related Question