Re: Speedstep and Audio
Re: Speedstep and Audio
- Subject: Re: Speedstep and Audio
- From: William Stewart <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 12:25:42 -0800
Hi Wolfgang
(Some background for those who may not know about this)
Speedstep is the changing and management of CPU power levels, clock rates, etc, that are used to manage heat, power consumption as it affects CPU performance and capability. It is a required part of modern CPU design or you have "thermal events" that essentially shut the CPU down. So, current CPU design requires some (aggressive) management of CPU performance for the chip to function.
With Snow Leopard there were some modifications of the basic strategies that are used with regards to audio apps that should have led to significant improvements in this area; basically at a certain point of CPU usage, the CPU is not going to go into deep-sleep states (because it takes too long to come back from these, and this time lag is destructive to correct audio performance).
So, that's the background. The actual work and strategies employed are developed and maintained by the OS/Kernel people. You should follow up with them (probably the darwin dev lists) to get more details about what their implementation compromises of and what a developer can do to work within these policies.
Bill
On Mar 5, 2010, at 7:57 AM, Wolfgang Kundrus wrote:
> I would be nice, if someone could explain, how audio playback can be affected by Speedstep on Mac OS X and what a developer could do to circumvent any negative implications.
>
> Thanks
> Wolfgang
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