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The OS can keep a record over time of the maximum frequency each CPU core has ever hit. This will take into account machine to machine variance, and even envir

• wtallis 5y ago
  That strategy guarantees that a process that runs for multiple minutes while consuming all available CPU cycles will be reported as using 100% CPU at most during the first few seconds, after which it will usually be reported as using somewhere less than 90%, and realistically could be reported as low as 65%. How is this helpful?
• jeffbee 5y ago
  Estimating x86 core frequency is a lot trickier than you've implied.
• toast0 5y ago
  Oh, but it gets more fun. The same operation can take more clocks for various reasons... If I really undervolt my Zen 2 apu, power usage and benchmarks go way down, but clock frequency stays high; the CPU is clock stretching and it gets a lot less work done. Anyway, current processors run a separate clock per core, and maximum clocks are only available when a small number of cores are active; if all cores are busy, that should really be 100%, even if each core is only doing 80% of max for a single core. Mostly, I want to see % of time cpu is busy, and separately, stats on how throttled the cpu is, because it's hard to combine both into a coherent number. Maybe also some idea of how much of the core is being exercised, if it can be easily measured... I'd love to know when a program is keeping the cpu busy, but not making good use of it.