According to the System panel, the seamicro machines (such as b-2008-sm-0046) have a Xeon E3-2165L @ 2.4GHz processor. However, according to CoreTemp, the cpu frequency is stuck at 1599.70MHz, even when running a CPU intensive task. In contrast, the same task on an ix machine will cause the cpu frequency to scale up to the reported 2.4GHz. Q, can we get some help here? Any idea why the cpu isn't scaling up when under load? This is affecting our PGO link times (which are mostly CPU intensive), in particular on bug 1047621 for aurora opt/nightlies. Marking critical because this blocks 1047621, which is critical.

I'm .. guessing .. this is meant to be a Relops bug?

My gut says it is something to do with c state setup. Let me take a look. Q

Q, can you give an update on this please?

I have seen some changes altering the "bios" options on the seamicro. bios c-state and bios cpuscalingfreq. The behavior has been inconsistent and the core clock speed returns at 1599- 1600 mhz with a 16x multiple after a reboot even if I get it to change. I am going to try a series of hardware and software combinations to force up clock and test to see If we hit peak under load or if the scaling is locked.

We have too many burning fires on windows right now, and this is one of two of which are seamicro specific. Until we can get the other issues under control, we're disabling all of the seamicros since we have enough capacity and they're actually hurting us by being in the build and try pools.

The seamicro's haven't really proven adequate for performance and manageability, so we're likely not going to use them for production going forward.