Re: HP ze4610us Laptop: Is it really rated at 1.87GHz?

Nathan Given wrote...
> I just purchased a HP ze4610us laptop from Circuit City, here is the
> web page...
snip
> How come my core speed is 530.1 MHz?

AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+?

It's based upon AMD's PowerNow! technology. The processor is designed to
run at a wide range of clock rate and core voltage settings. The actual
values enabled are programmed into the BIOS and passed to Windows when you
boot up. HP have probably enabled six processor states with multiplier
settings between 4x and 14x. If you set your Windows power scheme to
"Always On" then it should run at maximum speed (and maximum power
consumption!) all the time. If set to "Portable/Laptop" then it will run at
minimum power when demand is light but run up through higher states as CPU
load goes up. If you try running a benchmark utility you will probably only
see the CPU switch between the max and min states but if you monitor the CPU
activity during (eg) DVD playback you should see the intermediate states
come into play as well as the Windows Power Management interface (ACPI)
tries to keep the CPU demand close to 100%. This mode is the one to use,
since it should have minimal impact on the perceived power but give a big
improvement in battery life. When working on mains power it will also give
the advantage of reducing fan activity. Setting the scheme to Battery
Optimized will run the processor at minimum speed all the time when on
battery, for enhanced battery life. For maximum flexibility try
SpeedSwitchXP from http://www.diefer.de

If you seem to have a reduction of power when running on batteries, even
when running at full speed, then you may have another problem. HP notebooks
often seem to implement Clock Throttling when disconnected from mains power
(ie regularly turn off the processor for a proportion of clock cycles) in
addition to the correct operation of PowerNow! (It has to be a mistake!).
If you have this problem then a workaround is often to put the notebook into
standby and then wake it up, which has the effect of disabling clock
throttling.

David