Can you manually turn off a Core in Santa Rosa?

I have the dv9500t with a 2.2GHz Santa Rosa CPU and I have heard that the Santa Rosa chipset is designed to turn off one of the Cores when the computer is not using it in order to save battery life. Does this feature come automatically because how would I know if a core turns off or not?

Also is there a way to turn off a core manually? Because if I am just word processing it would nice if I could turn off one core to increase battery life and it would make the notebook cooler and run silently. Any help would be great, thanks.

~Eric

 

I, on the other hand have always wondered if my second core is ever utilized with the software I use.

 

With RMClock you can see what your core is running at. As far as manually turning off a core, it's not possible AFAIK, but don't be worried about battery life because the Santa Rosa chipset automatically halves its FSB during non-intensive sessions.

The reason Santa Rosa turns off a core is not to save battery life but instead to optimize it for single-threaded operations. By turning off a core, it can overclock the other one and not result in overheating.

Finally, the second core in my computer is almost always utilized. All you have to do is start the Task Manager to see it.

 

So how can you see the work loads of individual cores from the task manager? All I see is an overall CPU mark and not individual cores.

 

If you have a dual core processor, in the task manager, under the performance tab, the CPU section is split down the middle, the left half for one core, the right for the other.

 

If it helps, I have an option in my BIOS of the 6910p to enable/disable 'Dual Core CPU'
Also, at least in XP using Notebook Hardware Control, you can decrease the internal clock of the cpu in percentage points - eg if I go 50% then idling my CPU runs at 400Mhz (1/2 of 800Mhz) and the FSB runs at 50Mhz 200Mhz quad pumped. I don't think I'd do this in Vista though - it gets noticably slower

Edit: I've just tried disabling Dual Core in the BIOS, and indeed it does disable a core. It also overclocks the processor when max performance is selected (eg when running at full speed on power). My C2D will run at 12x200 = 2.4Ghz, and I've noticed this happen sometimes when dual core is ennabled (using CPU-z).
However I'd still prefer dual core

 

I amnot sure how one would do that across the board. But what you can do is isolate the TASK via taskmanager, right click the process and choose SET AFFINITY. You should then see a pop-up with 2 core check boxes. Un-checking one will force the whole TASK to run on an individuale processor. This in effect frees up tons of processing power to do other things.

What I am not sure is if the AFFINITY settiing wil stick the next time you run this process.

Hope this helps.

--Mickey

 

Just quite frankly don't mess with it. Santa Rosa was set up smart enough to know when to half its FSB and when to turn off a core to overclock the other one. The reason multi-core processors were developed is to replace older single-core ones. Thus it makes no sense to turn a core off manually when it can manage itself.

 

i always use both cores, i know because i leave my task manager on and occasionally i notice the CPU meters. i used the "set affinity" feature probably two times, and its a cool feature. i LOVE dual core.

Santa Rosa IS smart enough to know how much power to use and when to use it.... but i guess some (me included) like to play around with settings and customize things

good luck