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I recently took my laptop to get cleaned and I saved the output of the command lshw to make sure the hardware was not changed.

After I got it back, I ran the lshw command again and did a diff, and I found out there's a difference between the CPU's capacity. Previously it was 1GHz and now it became 800MHz. Should I be worried? There is no serial number for Intel's processor anymore, therefore I can't tell whether it was changed or not.

Here is the output of lshw before the clean up:

*-cpu

description: CPU
product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 4
bus info: cpu@0
version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
serial: N/A
slot: N/A
 size: 1GHz
 capacity: 1GHz
width: 64 bits
clock: 100MHz
capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq
configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=4 threads=8

And here's the output after the clean up:

*-cpu
description: CPU
product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 4
bus info: cpu@0
version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
serial: N/A
slot: N/A
 size: 800MHz
 capacity: 800MHz
width: 64 bits
clock: 100MHz
capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq
configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=4 threads=8
Gareth
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hadilnc01
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1 Answers1

0

Solved!

I ran the yes | yes | yes | yes command on a terminal for about a minute and then ran lshw in a different terminal and got 1GHz back. I ran yes | yes | yes | yes on two different terminals at the same time, and did lshw and got 2.3GHz.

I therefore concluded that this value scales with CPU utilization and it's not fixed.

Gareth
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hadilnc01
  • 21