Comments on: SpeedStep throttling on MacOS X?

By: O

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:57:44 +0000

You should submit this to the darwin mailing list….
Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com)

By: Marco

Marco — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:26:31 +0000

Since Mac OS X has a lot in common with FreeBSD you may be able to control the SpeedStep settings with sysctl.
Try displaying all available tunables with “sysctl hw.acpi.cpu”. Changing a value would require something along the lines of “sysctl hw.acpi.cpu.[parameter]=[value]“, provided sysctl is available on Mac OS X. Good luck!

By: ant

ant — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:52:06 +0000

I’ve never used OS X but I’m assuming it’s got nicelevels like everything else, so you could try having a separate process busy-wait at low priority. I’m not sure it’d work since OS X might be ignoring reniced processes like cpufreq does.

Another idea, and this one’s a bit crazy, maybe you could trick it into thinking the CPU is overheating which technically should put it into thermal throttling. I doubt that’s doable in software though (and it might simply hard power-off if you get it to work…)

By: Matt Sayler

Matt Sayler — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:10:09 +0000

It costs monies, and I’m not sure if it works on anything but the MacBook[Pro]:

http://www.coolbook.se/CoolBook.html

By: kangaroo

kangaroo — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 19:27:16 +0000

Err, scratch that. I was on autopilot and thought you meant fans not cpufreq.

By: kangaroo

kangaroo — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 19:22:35 +0000

vlad,

http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/software/smcfancontrol2/index.html

Should do it for all Intel based macs.

-g

By: steppres

steppres — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:59:23 +0000

…wait, I just remembered, that was only under PPC Macs… excuse me while I slink away…

By: steppres

steppres — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:53:30 +0000

I thought you could change SpeedStep setting in Energy Saver under System Preferences…

By: Michał Bartoszkiewicz

Michał Bartoszkiewicz — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:13:41 +0000

CoolBook (http://www.coolbook.se/CoolBook.html) works for me on a MacBook Pro – I’m not sure if it will work on a Mini.