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SubjectRe: 'Detected 19943xxx Hz processor'-fluctuations...
Charles Cazabon <charlesc-linux@qcc.sk.ca> wrote:
>Dag Wieers <dag@digibel.be> wrote:
>> i don't think it really is random, maybe it differs beause the state of
>> the processor differs little. can't we use this to statistically measure
>> something about that processor ?
>>
>> the real question is: what causes these fluctuations ?
>>
>You're talking +-1000 cycles out of 200 million. This could easily be due
>to ambient temperature differences or other environmental factors.

Just for kicks I decided to let mhz.estimate run for a while in a loop, that
way I get thousands more quite-possibly-less-accurate statistics. Out of
59000 runs, here are the most deviant 20:

374.865421
374.865944
374.865967
374.866508
374.866577
374.867146
374.867292
374.867333
374.867610
374.867645
[...]
374.947681
374.947712
374.947716
374.947962
374.952847
374.960404
378.688356
378.688474
378.689010
378.725015

Another interesting statistic:

cat mhz.estimate.output | wc -l
59218
cat mhz.estimate.output | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort | uniq | wc -l
11147

After running gnuplot over it, I see a very straight line. It appears my
motherboard's clock is not affected by temperature. There are some
interesting dips and jolts but nothing resembling a curve.

Adding up all the numbers and dividing by 59218 gives us:
374.929090476, meaning the max deviation is -.063669476/+3.795924524.
The average deviation, something much more useful, I'm too lazy to
calculate. :)

Stripping out anything so deviant to not be in the 374 range, our plot looks
like so:

http://frantica.lly.org/~rcw/mhz-plot-19990111.png

mhz.estimate.c is below:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/time.h>

/* returns number of clock cycles since last reboot */
__inline__ unsigned long long int rdtsc()
{
unsigned long long int x;
__asm__ volatile (".byte 0x0f, 0x31" : "=A" (x));
return x;
}

main ()
{
/* find out the MHz of the processor by dividing
* clock cycles by seconds */

struct timezone tz;
struct timeval tvstart, tvstop;
unsigned long long int cycles[2]; /* gotta be 64 bit */
unsigned int microseconds; /* total time taken */

bzero(&tz, sizeof(tz));

gettimeofday(&tvstart, &tz);
cycles[0] = rdtsc();
gettimeofday(&tvstart, &tz);
#ifdef VERBOSE
printf("Clock cycles at start: %Lu\n", cycles[0]);
#endif
usleep(1000000);

cycles[1] = rdtsc();
gettimeofday(&tvstop, &tz);
microseconds = ((tvstop.tv_sec-tvstart.tv_sec)*1000000)+(tvstop.tv_usec-tvstart.tv_usec);

#ifdef VERBOSE
printf("Clock cycles at end: %Lu\n", cycles[1]);
printf("Microseconds elapsed: %u\n", microseconds);
#endif
printf("%f MHz processor.\n", (float)(cycles[1]-cycles[0])/microseconds);
}
--
Robert Woodcock - rcw@debian.org
"Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses" -- Richard Gabriel

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