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Comment by cameronhowe | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on your "CPU drivers" issue?

Sure, the standard Intel drivers would randomly throttle my CPU into unusability or completely disable turbo boost for hours. I switched to the acpi driver and used the performance and powersave governors when appropriate. This, however, resulted in even worse battery life and somewhat subpar performance.

Oh, and to be clear. The Intel driver would disable turbo boost even when the laptop was plugged in and the CPU wasn't running hot.

I had other issues when the CPU would run hot, but that turned out to be a faulty sensor triggering BD_PROCHOT. In fact, this was the issue that ThrottleStop allowed me to find and solve.

EDIT: The reason why I knew that this was a faulty sensor and not BD_PROCHOT doing its job was because I manually measured the temps on various components, each of which was completely within its normal operating temperature.

Interesting. I'm having trouble with my amd laptop stuttering a lot. It is worse under load of course, but even without any I can see random input/output lag.

I wonder if it the root cause could be the same.

Amd is developing a new governor (amd_pstate) for their cpu, you may have better luck with it ? On my laptop it works well and helped reduce the number of spikes. It requires a recent cpu and kernel though.

Here the Archlinux wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_frequency_scaling

I've found that random stuttering is often an indication of a drive about to go bad, especially if you have a spinning drive attached.

That said, I saw a lot of fan curve, temp issues in the later Intel macbooks... I had a $4000 macbook pro i9 that was effectively unusable with background services or Docker containers running at all.

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