Atom underclocks like mad!@!#$@

ok, so I was in the middle of working, and typing on microsoft word, and all the sudden, words didn't come out, then all the sudden, words came out.
So I decided to check with cpuz and realtemp and everest, and apparently, the cpu underclocked itself to as low as 312MHz!!!! yes, thats right, 312MHz!!
FSB is underclocking itself too!! what seems to be the problem here???
Oh, and I believe the ACPI is badly coded, because I used my laptop for the fifth day, and now battery has already 7% wear level!! So right now, I am recalibrating to see if it helps.

 

Windows.

 

I don't know, something just doesn't seem quite right with my aao...

 

There is no problem, half the point of the Atom design is dynamic underclocking to save power (and lower heat generation). I believe it defaults to 800 Mhz max when on battery anyway. You also aren't going to get a real reading from CPUZ unless you have a decent load (eg video playback) running in the background.

But your problem sounds like to much CPU utilisation (a usual symptom of which is loss of interactivity), perhaps caused by the Atom not clocking itself up quickly enough, or more likely just an app spiking CPU (Anti-virus programs love to do this).

 

I have another theory about this.

I recently read an blog from an intel engineer that flagged an issues with the power management in windows.

According to him, intel processors are designed to run at min clock of 800mhz. Running lower than that would not have much power savings and have great impact on basic user performance.
His recommendation is to only set the power setting to 'portable', and do not use 'max battery", 'presentation' modes. Those other modes do not use the built-in intel CPU power/performance management systems.
instead are microsoft OS setting which are not optimized, but just brain dead under-clocking. The difference is that real user experience suffers under those modes set by microsoft.

According to him, the battery savings are so small, it's just not worth the performance loss. So just set the power management to 'portable', and let the intel processor determine what clock rate to run at.
The micrsoft settings is probably why you are seeing these rediculus slowdowns.

 

hey, its more than one months old, but after updating the BIOS, I have not had this problem anymore. I guess this thread is case = closed.