Ryzen CPU idle speeds

[freeagent]

3300MHz using balanced power plan and HWiNFO64 for monitoring with “Snapshot CPU Polling” enabled.

It should be lower, snapshot polling hits the CPU a lot harder, and does not let it rest.

 

[_roman_]

I do not trust these tools at all. The minimal load is always jumping around. I consider that as idle. (htop on the left)
I doubt any tool reads out the hardware properly. I assume just one slice of time is used - not something what is average value or some sort.

Seems my setup is kinda bloated. That gentoo linux installation is from 2006. I remember having around 250MB of RAM usage in the graphical X-server without any "open apps". (mate-terminal, xscreensaver, time server, htop)

 

[Zach_01]

It should be lower, snapshot polling hits the CPU a lot harder, and does not let it rest.

I dont see it

I tried today with it disabled and min active speed is the same, 3300MHz.
But average (clock, usage, core count) are a bit elevated when disabled
It minimizes the observer effect after all. Not sure why you see the opposite.

 

[Chrispy_]

I do not trust these tools at all. The minimal load is always jumping around. I consider that as idle. (htop on the left)
I doubt any tool reads out the hardware properly. I assume just one slice of time is used - not something what is average value or some sort.

Seems my setup is kinda bloated. That gentoo linux installation is from 2006. I remember having around 250MB of RAM usage in the graphical X-server without any "open apps". (mate-terminal, xscreensaver, time server, htop)

View attachment 370253

Yeah, you see how you have 0.0% usage on cores 0-7, 10, 11?
So 10 of the 12 logical cores reported with "grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo" are definitely suspended at 0MHz, not the 480-545MHz being reported.

grep is just pulling the last reported clockspeed from suspended cores before they were suspended, which is useless, outdated information that is mostly wrong because most of the cores are actually asleep entirely.

One of your cores is probably running at 480-545 just ticking over background services. You'd need to ask AMD about the nature of this reported clockspeed. I'm unsure if those cores actually run at those low clocks, or whether they are jumping between suspended and base clocks in millisecond increments. My understanding of AMD's rush-to-idle behaviour that has underpinned everything from Zen+ onwards is that they'll run a thread as fast as possible to get the task finished so that the core can go back to sleep. That particular model doesn't support any 3-digit clockspeeds, but 3-digit clockspeeds is what the tools always report, with very very low voltages in line with low clockspeeds. Maybe the voltages are being sampled and averaged too? I honestly do not know (or care!)