CPU Package power limit notification

[Stonecold1995]

Hey guys, I am starting to get the same thing on my laptop. I installed psensor and it turns out my 4 cores run at 51-53°C each when IDLE (that's about 130 F).

I get the messages when booting. When I then turn the PC off and reboot, everything is fine.

It's an Intel Core i7 - 2670QM at 2.2 GHz.

How are you guys dealing with this?

I just try to use Konsole for command line because messages like that aren't displayed there.

[The Bright Side]

Tried the same, but "startx" didn't work from another console. I just went back to 12.04, like I had previously done on my desktop PC, too. 12.10 is pretty badly broken, but now I'm back on 12.04, everything's working fine. Thanks!

[cucisan]

hi guys,

this is due to the bios, which throttles the cpu - only seen that on laptops with core i5/7 with nvidia cards... the same problem exists on windows (where a programm was created to defeat this: google: throttlestop)

imho there is not much you can do about that... except trying to play with msr tools.

good luck

[jupeter]

Hi,

i have same problem Samsung Series 9 - NP900X3C.
CPU: Intel i7 3517U
Graphic: Intel HD Graphics 4000

Linux 3.5.0-23-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 24 13:15:40 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

cucisan: what do you meen about playing with msr tools?

My mcelog:

mcelog: Unsupported new Family 6 Model 3a CPU: only decoding architectural errors
mcelog: failed to prefill DIMM database from DMI data
mcelog: Unsupported new Family 6 Model 3a CPU: only decoding architectural errors
Hardware event. This is not a software error.
MCE 0
CPU 0 BANK 4
TIME 1360239379 Thu Feb 7 13:16:19 2013
MCG status:
MCi status:
Uncorrected error
Error enabled
Processor context corrupt
MCA: Internal unclassified error: 402
STATUS b200000000100402 MCGSTATUS 0
MCGCAP c07 APICID 0 SOCKETID 0
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 58
mcelog: Unsupported new Family 6 Model 3a CPU: only decoding architectural errors
mcelog: failed to prefill DIMM database from DMI data
mcelog: Unsupported new Family 6 Model 3a CPU: only decoding architectural errors
Hardware event. This is not a software error.
MCE 0
CPU 0 BANK 4
TIME 1360962986 Fri Feb 15 22:16:26 2013
MCG status:
MCi status:
Uncorrected error
Error enabled
Processor context corrupt
MCA: Internal unclassified error: 402
STATUS b200000000100402 MCGSTATUS 0
MCGCAP c07 APICID 0 SOCKETID 0
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 58

I found Bug report: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36182

[VitasLoWang]

It happened to me too! And I found out because my pc is suddendly quite slow. Download a program Sysinfo and check your current CPU frequency. I found out that my thinkpad T420 with Intel core i5 2.6GHz is now running just on 800MHz! No idea why! I will try restarting a computer
EDIT: CPU temperature is 56°C so no reason to slow down.

[VitasLoWang]

after restart it was at 1000MHz! WTH? And I found out what was happening. It was because of the malfunctioning laptop-mode package which I installed a long time ago to enable hibernation (I think). Even when CONTROL_CPU_FREQUENCY="auto" it was slowing down my CPU both on battery and on AC power. Really cool power saving feature :-\ After setting it to 0 in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/cpufreq.conf it magically runs on 2600MHz again.

[JohnReid]

Sysinfo says the 8 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60GHz on my Thinkpad W530 are running at frequency 1200.00 Mhz even when on AC power. So I guess my CPUs are being throttled. I don't have laptop-mode installed though so what can I do? Mess with the BIOS?

[Pyppe]

I've managed to tackle the CPU-scaling issues by overriding the on-demand throttling limit. With Ubuntu 13.04 the default value seems to be 95 which for me is way too high => CPU frequency is always at 800MHz. By lowering this (I've used 70) using file /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold, the scaling works as intended.

See https://gist.github.com/Pyppe/6028707 as an example.

My setup is Ubuntu 13.04 with Levono X1 Carbon.

P.S. I've still seeing the "Package power limit notification" messages, but at least the scaling seems to be working.

[3rdalbum]

It happened to me too! And I found out because my pc is suddendly quite slow. Download a program Sysinfo and check your current CPU frequency. I found out that my thinkpad T420 with Intel core i5 2.6GHz is now running just on 800MHz! No idea why! I will try restarting a computer
EDIT: CPU temperature is 56°C so no reason to slow down.

Your "problem" is perfectly normal and intended behaviour.

CPUs don't just decelerate when they overheat, they also decelerate when they are not under heavy load. It's a power-saving feature of all CPUs since the Core 2 and maybe even earlier. Even when on AC your CPU will run slowly when little is happening and speed up automatically when needed.