Intel NUC 10th CPU frequency not fully utilitized

[ahmedvienna]

So i have bought an 10th GEN i7 and i installed on it esxi 7.0 U1 with (10710u CPU).

 

my CPU according to intel should be clocking at 4.7.

However the ESXi only recognizes 1.1GHz.

when i installed an OS.  it shows at 1.1 or 1.6:

I have disabled all power saving in the Windows 10, ESXi, and BIOS:

 

so my question is, why am I not getting the full 4.7 GHz ? what am i missing?

Thanks

A

[Valentin Bondzio]

What you see in ESXi / Windows is just the brandstring. I.e. literally some text that is saved in registered in the CPU.

1.1 GHz or probably rather 1.61 GHz is the nominal frequency, 4.7 might be single core Turbo Boosted. For Turbo Boost to work you'll need to present deep C-States to the OS (ESXi) and select e.g. a Balanced policy so that ESXi is using those deep C-States so that non-idle cores can be "overclocked" to run at those higher frequencies.

Check out https://www.vmworld.com/en/video-library/video-landing.html?sessionid=15614128031020019IBb&region=EU where I talk about this in more detail.

[ahmedvienna]

Thanks a lot for this answer. it gave me an idea to read more about how esxi interacts with the physical hosts (i.e. the nuc devices).

this article as well as your answer helped me a lot:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/80610

 

[Valentin Bondzio]

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(...) read more (...)

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Don't forget to watch the session too if you have the time The power management segment is ~ 25 minutes and all you need is a free vmworld.com account.

[beni513]

Hi ahmed,

I have the same problem, I have the same nuc and changed already the power managment policy to balanced.
I checked also the BIOS configuration, but I am still stuck at 1,6 GHz.

Could you please tell me how you resolved this problem? If it was only the BIOS configuration It would be great if you could share the config.

Kind regards!

[Valentin Bondzio]

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196448/intel-core-i7-10710u-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-70-ghz.html

(...)
Processor Base Frequency 1.10 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency 4.70 GHz
(...)
Configurable TDP-up Frequency 1.60 GHz
(...)

It seem you can BIOS configure the OS perceived base / nominal frequency, hence the difference in brand string and detected NF.

Can you run this here on your host?

[root@esx01:~] gzip -dc /var/log/boot.gz | grep -i smp.*measured
0:00:00:04.767 cpu12:1048588)SMP: 299: cpu 12: measured cpu speed: 2399997972 Hz, TSC speed: 2399997972 Hz, bus speed: 99999906 Hz