Dell Precision 5560 and Intel i7-11800H: frequency 2.5GHz

Hi,
I have a Dell Precision 5560 with Intel i7-11800H.
I have installed Fedora 35 but I noticed that the cpu is stuck at 2.50 GHz and the only cpu governor available are performance and powersave:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_available_governors
performance powersave

Even if I changed the governor to powersave:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor 
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave
powersave

It is still stuck to 2.50 GHz according to htop.

Instead:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq 
915151
1140842
838496
1185733
1170044
1065751
968244
1273721
800754
832968
891795
1007390
1229427
1223665
1390050
1141154

$ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 1387.923
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 1442.865
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 1511.330
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000

I am not sure which one is right one.

Thanks

What is the output of inxi -Cxx?
That should give the minimum and maximum cpu freq plus the current operating freq for each core.
My desktop with a rhyzen 5 cpu shows this

# inxi -Cxx
CPU:       Info: 6-Core model: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen 2 rev: 0 cache: L1: 384 KiB L2: 3 MiB
           L3: 32 MiB
           flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 86235
           Speed: 4060 MHz min/max: 2200/3600 MHz boost: enabled Core speeds (MHz): 1: 4060 2: 4060 3: 4062 4: 4062 5: 4060
           6: 4062 7: 4062 8: 4062 9: 4060 10: 4061 11: 4064 12: 4062

As you can see all cores are running in turbo mode (~98% load).
and the output of your commands give me

# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq
4045448
4043067
4042513
4045430
4063967
4048048
4047971
4062364
4041725
4036685
4051999
4045526


# grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo
cpu MHz		: 4062.227
cpu MHz		: 4062.681
cpu MHz		: 4062.574
cpu MHz		: 4069.890
cpu MHz		: 4069.888
cpu MHz		: 4069.995
cpu MHz		: 4062.279
cpu MHz		: 4062.733
cpu MHz		: 4062.627
cpu MHz		: 4069.869
cpu MHz		: 4069.864
cpu MHz		: 4069.972

I would trust the numbers you posted for the current load on that system.

Hi, just for note, by using cat it’s only capture the value at the time we run the cat. The other hands, if displaying the value from specific app (GUI/TUI), they also capturing the value at certain interval and not realtime.

You could try with:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq & grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo

Above approach are to get as close as possible the time when get the snapshot of cpu speed.

The htop it self I believe only tool to display the information that already available from the system by reading it. It also possible that htop failed to read the info.

But if you believe that there no different between powersave and performance, maybe you also want to check the bios setting if there any specific setting that control your cpu speed (power management) that make the OS failed to overwrite it.

$ inxi -Cxx; cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq; grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo
CPU:       Info: 8-Core model: 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11850H bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Tiger Lake rev: 1 cache: L1: 640 KiB
           L2: 10 MiB L3: 24 MiB
           flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx bogomips: 79872
           Speed: 891 MHz min/max: 800/4800 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1120 2: 1079 3: 981 4: 1051 5: 1083 6: 1045 7: 1105
           8: 1073 9: 1085 10: 1446 11: 994 12: 1103 13: 1097 14: 1029 15: 1042 16: 1187
1120132
981200
1050518
1083444
1044931
1105147
1072641
1079295
1085454
1445880
994032
1102845
1096839
1029282
1041576
1186907
cpu MHz		: 1120.132
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 1096.839
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 1083.444
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000
cpu MHz		: 2500.000

Yes, you were right about the bios settings.

Once I disabled “Intel Speed Shift Technology”, frequency is scaling and I can see more governor.

Funny enough:

This option is used to enable/disable Intel Speed-Shift Technology. Setting this option to enable allows the operating system to select the appropriate processor performance automatically.

Sound the opposite to me.

Intel Speed Shift uses the bios to control speed while disabling it allows the OS to control speed. The description sounds right to me.

From my understanding:

  • enable Speed Shift = OS can set
  • disable Speed Shift = OS cannot set but the bios willf

It could be also the bios firmware referring to Windows, since lot of manufactures build their machine to be compatible with Windows OS.