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StellarVixen

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Mar 1, 2018
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Is it normal behavior for CPU to go above the base clock speed when you are just simply...moving the mouse around?
Screen Shot 2018-08-28 at 12.31.34 PM.png

If you take a look at this, frequency graph more precisely, will notice the first few several spikes, those are probably the background processes only, and they do not go above the base clock.

Take a look at the spikes after that, that is caused by my moving the mouse around. Almost 3 GHz to move a mouse pointer?

Is this normal behavior?

I have tried to disconnect the mouse from the USB hub, and plug it directly into the Mac. There is no difference.

EDIT: Tried one more thing, to disable "Shake mouse pointer to locate", thought there might be a function that monitors the mouse pointer, and is maybe taking this much CPU. No effect, same behavior.
[doublepost=1535453661][/doublepost]Learn something new everyday. Didn't know that processing the input data from a mouse can be this demanding.
 
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Its impossible to discern what is causing any issues with the Intel Power Gadget. Use Activity Monitor to see what's consuming your CPU.

By the way, your utilization looks rather low with some constant activity at 20% in the middle of the graph. To see I don't anything consuming your CPU given the utilization is so low.

Spikes are for CPU jumping up and going back down, and again, not seeing the activity monitor, its really not the right tool to discern what's the cause.
 
Its impossible to discern what is causing any issues with the Intel Power Gadget. Use Activity Monitor to see what's consuming your CPU.

By the way, your utilization looks rather low with some constant activity at 20% in the middle of the graph. To see I don't anything consuming your CPU given the utilization is so low.

Spikes are for CPU jumping up and going back down, and again, not seeing the activity monitor, its really not the right tool to discern what's the cause.

Thank you very much for reply. I always see you going around the forum, helping people.

No, Activity Monitor is not showing any resources hog, everything looks OK there.

These spikes are from moving the mouse. Every spike is the individual movement. I can replicate these exact results anyway.

I learned from another place that this is normal.
 
Every spike is the individual movement.
I can't say why those spikes are occurring. I don't see it on my MBP. I have my laptop hooked up to an external keyboard mouse and I cannot cause the frequency to spike moving the cursor around
 
I can't say why those spikes are occurring. I don't see it on my MBP. I have my laptop hooked up to an external keyboard mouse and I cannot cause the frequency to spike moving the cursor around

Is your Mac the newer one? It might have the better single core performance, mouse data is processed on a single core.
 
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