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sdugoten

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2010
147
72
Does anyone know if the Macbook air is not plug into power socket for power, does the CPU throttle the speed?

Thanks.
 
Last edited:

jdavtz

macrumors 6502a
Aug 22, 2005
548
0
Kenya
I don't think it will. It -- AFAIK -- throttles CPU speed/voltage based on load, not power profile. If you give it a full load on battery power, it will work as hard as it can to finish that workload (which may actually save battery -- 1 minute at full speed and 1 minute at idle speed may well be more efficient than 2 minutes at 50% speed).

What's important is throttling the voltage, not the speed.

We need the Coolbook developer to update his software, really.
 

Gav2k

macrumors G3
Jul 24, 2009
9,216
1,608
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

As above it does it all the time not just on battery!
 

2IS

macrumors 68030
Jan 9, 2011
2,938
433
I don't think it will. It -- AFAIK -- throttles CPU speed/voltage based on load, not power profile. If you give it a full load on battery power, it will work as hard as it can to finish that workload (which may actually save battery -- 1 minute at full speed and 1 minute at idle speed may well be more efficient than 2 minutes at 50% speed).

What's important is throttling the voltage, not the speed.

We need the Coolbook developer to update his software, really.

The developer needs to update it on two fronts.

1) Doesn't work on i5/i7
2) Doesn't work on Lion

I've got a 2010 MBA and have been using cookbook until it promptly stopped working when I upgraded to Lion. Rumor out there is that there will be an update and will cost $5 for existing users. I emailed the developer several days ago but have not received a reply.
 

jace88

macrumors 6502
Jan 3, 2011
320
121
Sydney, Australia
Thanks for the info. Bit surprised there is no inbuilt Mac OS X way of throttling the CPU down to lengthen battery life especially if doing very low intensity tasks like taking notes in class (i.e. word processing). I remember in older Macbooks at least, there was an option to click on Power and set to better performance or better battery which was probably CPU throttling?
 

2IS

macrumors 68030
Jan 9, 2011
2,938
433
Thanks for the info. Bit surprised there is no inbuilt Mac OS X way of throttling the CPU down to lengthen battery life especially if doing very low intensity tasks like taking notes in class (i.e. word processing). I remember in older Macbooks at least, there was an option to click on Power and set to better performance or better battery which was probably CPU throttling?

The CPU does throttle both in voltage and clock sped on it's own. Coolbook takes an additional step and allows user selected settings that lowers the voltage even below what Intel specifies. Apple isn't going to allow you to run the CPU out of spec (nor should they) which is what cookbook is essentially allowing you to do.
 
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