cpufreq: cpu frequency going down to minimum just when I need extra power

Question

I've spent almost 3 days around this problem, to no avail.

I felt the laptop was running slow on certain tasks, slower than usual so I downloaded cpufreq extension to try and monitor and maybe directly control the CPU running frequency and power consumption.

The problem is that I always see the CPU frequency drop to a minimal value (either 800MHz or 400MHz) on all 8 cores for no apparent reason. this seems to happen just when I need extra power- running code projects locally, opening several browser tabs etc.

I'm using cpufreq gnome shell extension to try and manually control the values, but this does not seem to help. no matter the changes, before and after reboots, the problem seems to appear out of nowhere, and disappear as well.

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Things I've tried after researching online, but didn't help:

• By default the intel_pstate driver was used, but I disabled it (by editing /etc/default/grub), and now using acpi driver
• tried using CPU Power Manager gnome shell extension as well to control the power/speed programmatically
• in cpufreq extension, I've tried every min-max frequency combination I can think of, as well as switch between governor programs, and enable/disable frequency boost
• I tried settings the max frequency directly for ALL 8 cores, and disable ppc like this:

-- echo 1 | sudo dd of=/sys/module/processor/parameters/ignore_ppc

-- echo 2900000 | sudo dd of=/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

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Any ideas going forward? I really dont know what to do. this prevents me from working, as most code-developing tasks I do require some horsepower. even scrolling a text editor up and down becomes a pain on 400MHz, while several other things are running in the background.

Here's a random screenshot from cpufreq with some more technical details:

Here is the relevant BIOS settings:

Answer 1

You can set the CPU to maximum speed using this bash script:

Make a file called cpumaxspeed.sh and enter in this code:

#!/bin/bash
#Getting and setting variables

echo Getting info....

CPUMIN=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_min_freq)
CPUMAX=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq)
CPUMAXGHZ=$(echo "scale=1; $CPUMAX / 1000000" | bc)
CPUMINGHZ=$(echo "scale=1; $CPUMIN / 1000000" | bc)

#Display min and max CPU frequency in MHz
echo CPU min frequency: $CPUMIN" MHz" / $CPUMINGHZ" GHz"
echo CPU max frequency: $CPUMAX" MHz" / $CPUMAXGHZ" GHz"

#Setting CPU governor
echo Setting governor to performance
sudo cpufreq-set -r -g performance
echo Set governor to performance

#Setting to max frequency
echo Setting CPU frequency to be $CPUMAX" MHz" / $CPUMAXGHZ" GHz"
sudo cpufreq-set -r -f $CPUMAXGHZ"GHz"
echo Set CPU frequency to $CPUMAXGHZ"GHz"

done

Execute it with this command:

sudo sh cpumaxspeed.sh