I often see, in the performance monitor, CPU speed varying according to CPU utilization: When utilization increases speed increases:
However sometimes this relationship is inverted: Speed increases when utilization decreases:
On the image above, most of the time CPU is decreased for load peaks, but the direct relationship restarts for the last quarter of the graph. It seems this happens below a certain "load" value. If that matters, when the CPU is fully used (with the current power management settings) frequency is at some intermediate level:
What is the technical explanation for how speed is managed, and how power selected management strategy is taken into account here?
Reference to Intel or general documentation preferred to guesswork ;-)
Questions I have read before asking:
- Task manager: CPU Utilization and speed?
- CPU Utilization in Task Manager
- What is CPU utilization and how is it calculated, how does OS scheduling work?
Using W7 on Lenovo W510 (720 QM, i7 family).