Quick CPU (formerly known as Core Parking Manager v3) is an application that was designed to fine-tune and monitor CPU performance settings such as: Core Parking, Frequency Scaling and Turbo Boost, as well as making other adjustments. Below you’ll find all the information about how it works, how to interpret application data and settings, and how to make these adjustments.

CPU Performance and power consumption

Back in a day, most computers were desktop machines with the main goal for the hardware, to offer absolute best performance and there was no real need for technologies such as SpeedStep, Turbo Boost etc.

However, in the modern world, power consumption sometimes takes a higher priority than performance output. Considering significant change in technology and expectations from the hardware, CPU's have gotten a lot of new features such as TurboBoost, SpeedStep, Hyper-Threading and individual core state/s that help to reduce power consumption and heat. Even though these are all positive changes, it sometimes creates a situation where an end user is not getting top performance when it is required (delayed performance boostboost). This can be caused by many hard to predict factors, such as system state, availability, CPU state, heat and many many more. This application was made to provide help in controlling such factors and reduce the effect of degrading performance when possible. Many features mentioned above will be described in greater details in the description below, so if you are interested read on ...

Frequency scaling

CPU frequency scaling is a feature that enables the operating system to scale CPU frequency up or down to try and match supply to demand, delivering CPU performance when necessary or saving energy when possible. Similar to Core Parking OS is trying to scale CPU frequency dynamically based on the system load. The index for this control works similar to Core parking. On specific detail about the frequency scaling is that even if you set an index to 100% it’ll increase (and keep) the frequency up to the CPU base frequency level, and still use dynamic scaling for any extra performance

You can see an example in the image below where frequency scaling is set to 100% and the OS is keeping CPU frequency as close to its base (2.6 GHz in this specific example) as possible at all times. However, you can see that during heavy system loads CPU can spike higher than its base frequency thanks to ‘Turbo Boost’ technology. The good news is that you can go above the base frequency levels and keep your CPU close to it’s Maximum possible frequency thanks to Intel Turbo Boost and AMD Turbo CORE technologies. And that’s what the next section is about.

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Turbo boost

During the normal system load CPU in your system operates at a standard clock speed (which indicates its overall performance). In fact, if some heavy lifting is required (considering power usage) Turbo Boost kicks in increasing CPU clock frequency for the duration of the task. By setting TurboBoost index to its maximum value CPU will try to provide performance greater than the performance level corresponding to the Processor base frequency at all times.

Intel Turbo Boost and AMD Turbo CORE technologies are features that allow processors to achieve additional performance when it is most useful (that is, at high system loads). Basically it raises CPU operating frequency (as well as performance) in a dynamic (non deterministic) way.

Here’s what Intel states about their turbo boost technology:

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.01 accelerates processor and graphics performance for peak loads, automatically allowing processor cores to run faster than the rated operating frequency if they’re operating below power, current, and temperature specification limits. Whether the processor enters into Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 and the amount of time the processor spends in that state depends on the workload and operating environment.

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C-State Residency (Intel)

Processor C-states are idle power saving states and during all the C-state/s (other than C0) the processor is idle, meaning that nothing is executing. C0 can be considered as an idle power state, meaning it is the non-idle state when the core is actually executing instructions.

Core idle states - How It works

Each core has several idle states, C0, C1, C3 etc ... After all hardware threads supported by a core have executed HALT instruction (instruction which halts CPU/unit until the next external interrupt is fired) core transitions to the first non iddle state C1. Now that the core is in C1, the coprocessor's power management (don't mistake with the OS power manager) routine needs to figure out whether it is worthwhile to shut the core down further and drop it into a next C-state. In which case, further parts of the core are shut down and power gated.

On the images below (see aplication footer) you can observe the percentage of time CPU spends in the specific C-State supported by the CPU.

Program Features

• Performance graph for each core. Displays if the core is Active or Parked
• Adjustable size for the individual CPU graph
• Real time counter to display number of active vs parked cores
• Adjustable CPU core parking settings
• Adjustable CPU frequency scaling settings
• Adjustable CPU turbo boost settings
• Real time C-State Residency indicators and configuration
• Real time CPU speed
• Real time CPU utilization
• Real time CPU temperature
• System power output
• System power state settings support (AC/DC)
• System power plan support
• Ability to check for application updates (Manual & Auto) under "Help->Check for updates" menu option
• Changes are applied on the fly. NO NEED TO RESTART