This is the most unusually problem that I have. I have an AMD Turion TL-56 processor. It's dual core and the default frequency is 1.8 ghz. For the past few months, the clock speed has been droppign to 800mhz. I installed a program that allows me to control the clock speed for the K8 processor family called cpupowerd
so I am able to adjust the speed back to what It's suppose to be easily. I installed the program about 2 months before this problem started happening.
It typically occurs when I'm running an application, or applications that require a rather large amount of system resources. If I run videos on youtube via firefox, occasionally the clock speed will drop, not necessarily though. I will be obvious as the machine starts to become somewhat unresponsive, and with video streaming, the frame rate will drop dramatically. I know the clock speed of the processor is dropping because of the outputs from:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "MHz"
cpu MHz : 800.000
cpu MHz : 800.000
and
$ sudo cpupowerd -s
cpupowerd 0.2.1 written by Markus Strobl.
WARNING: This program could cause damage to your Hardware!
Vendor : AMD
Family : K8
Model : 4
Mastercpuid : 0
Affected cpuids : 0 1
Current voltage (VID) : 0.8000 V (30)
Current frequency (FID) : 800 MHz (0)
Supported frequencies : 800 1600 1800 MHz
I am able to reset it with
$ sudo cpupowerd --freq "0|1800"
cpupowerd 0.2.1 written by Markus Strobl.
WARNING: This program could cause damage to your Hardware!
For a while I thought something from Chrome was causing the problem (as there were several Chrome processes running even when I wasn't using the browser). However, I uninstalled Chrome and the problem still persists whenever I need to do something that requires more resources. This is particularly a problem when I run virtualbox which will cause the system to lock up completely (800mhz on a dual core processor just can't handle the sudden load).
When booting, accessing the system bios doesn't let me adjust the clockspeed which is set to 1800mhz (as I want it).
What is causing this shift in processing speed? Are there any logs that I can access that might shed light?
Edit: Regardless of what speed the processor is actually running out, dmidecode reports 1800MHz
$ sudo dmidecode -t processor | grep "Speed"
Max Speed: 1800 MHz
Current Speed: 1800 MHz