How do you control throttling on a desktop Pentium/Celeron

[paulsiu]

I recently tried to identified the processor on my girlfriend's laptop. It is:

Celeron II, Copermine Lite, step cD0.

As far as I can tell, this is not a mobile processor. RmClock shows that it has a clock speed of 1095 Mhz and is throttling at 291 Mhz because of the Toshiba power saver.

I thought desktop only throttle if there was a thermal problem. How is this throttle being done in the code?

Paul

 

[Keego]

Well, to throttle a regular PC all you do is cut the bus/clock speed and voltage, so maybe somehow they have the mobo setup to do this on a hardware level in which the software interacts with it?

 

[WobbleWobble]

I would think that desktop Celeron chips in laptops are very rare. The mobile Celeron chip would have something called SpeedStep to automatically throttle down the CPU speed when it's not being used or being run on battery to save power.

 

[ssvegeta1010]

Speedswitch XP

 

[Peter]

Pentium-III processors don't have internal throttling. This is done "round the outside" via the chipset southbridge.

There _are_ mobile flavors of the Coppermine core alright, btw. What these might have is 1st-generation SpeedStep that lets them switch between two speeds, typically "low" speed on DC power and "full" on AC. "Low" speed is never lower than 500 MHz IIRC, so if you see something below 300, then that's from the chipset throttling it.