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While I sympathize with this point of view, I feel that reporting the CPU usage at 50% is a more accurate representation of the situation. The argument for the first point of view is that if your system is acting sluggish, or you hear the fan turn on, you want go to a performance monitor tool and see that, “Oh, program X is using 100% CPU, that’s the problem.” If the system had used the second model, you would see that program X is using 50% CPU, and you would say, “Well, that’s not the problem, because there’s still 50% CPU left for other stuff,” unaware that the other 50% of CPU capacity has been turned off due to throttling. One theory is that this should report 100% CPU usage, because that CPU-intensive program is causing the CPU to consume all of its available cycles.Īnother theory is that this should report 50% CPU usage, because even though that CPU-intensive program is causing the CPU to consume all of its available cycles, it is not consuming all off the cycles that are potentially available. The question is: What percentage CPU usage should performance monitoring tools report?
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Finally, let’s say that there’s a program that is CPU-intensive, calculating the Mandelbrot set or something. Assume for this scenario that the CPU has been throttled to half-speed for whatever reason, could be thermal, could be energy efficiency, could be due to workload.
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We discovered similar results on the last generation Surface Pro 6 and even Surface Pro 5 and the latest Surface Pro 7 appears to be no different.For simplicity, let’s say you have a single-CPU system that supports “dynamic frequency scaling”, a feature that allows software to instruct the CPU to run at a lower speed, commonly known as “CPU throttling”. While this looks good on paper, the steeper throttling can be off-putting to performance users.
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After accounting for the throttling on both devices, users can expect a 22 percent deficit in processor performance on the tablet relative to the Surface Laptop 3.ĬPU throttling is not uncommon on tablets, but it's particularly noticeable on the Surface Pro series since Microsoft insists on equipping its flagship models with the same Intel U series processors as found on larger Ultrabooks. The tablet eventually stabilizes at a nearly 30 percent performance dip from its original score.
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780 points) only to degrade faster and steeper over time on the Surface Pro 7 tablet. Performance starts out relatively the same between the two systems at the beginning of the run (770 points vs. We can observe CPU performance changes over time on each system when running CineBench R15 Multi-Thread in a loop as shown in the chart below. Our latest example is between the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 15 and 12.3-inch Surface Pro 7 tablet each equipped with an Intel 10th gen Core i7-1065G7 CPU. It's easy to forget that larger laptops are generally faster than thinner laptops despite having similar internal specifications. As we've mentioned before in the past, the performance of a processor can vary greatly between two different laptops even if both are equipped with the same CPU.
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