SPEC CPU2006 Platform Settings for Lenovo Systems
- Zone Reclaim:
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Zone reclaim allows the reclaiming of pages from a zone if the number of free pages
falls below a watermark even if other zones still have enough pages available.
Reclaiming a page can be more beneficial than taking the performance penalties that
are associated with allocating a page on a remote zone, especially for NUMA machines.
- Operating Mode Selections: (Default="Efficiency -Favor Performance")
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The average customer doesn't know the best way to set each individual power/performance feature for
their specific environment. Because of this, a menu option is provided that can help a customer optimize
the system for things such as minimum power usage/acoustic levels, maximum efficiency, Energy Star
optimization, or maximum performance.
- "Minimal Power" mode strives to minimize the absolute power consumption of the system while it is
operating. The tradeoff is that performance may be reduced in this mode depending on the application
that is running.
- "Efficiency -Favor Power" mode maximizes the performance/watt efficiency with a bias towards power
savings. It provides the best features for reducing power and increasing performance in applications
where maximum bus speeds are not critical. It is expected that this will be the favored mode for
SPECpower testing. "Efficiency -Favor Power" mode maintains backwards compatibility with systems
that included the preset operating modes before Energy Star for servers was released.
- "Efficiency -Favor Performance" mode optimizes the performance/watt efficiency with a bias towards
performance. It is the favored mode for Energy Star. Note that this mode is slightly different than
"Efficiency -Favor Power" mode. In "Efficiency - Favor Performance" mode, no bus speeds are derated
as they are in "Efficiency -Favor Power" mode. "Efficiency -Favor Performance" mode is the default
mode.
- "Maximum Performance" mode will maximize the absolute performance of the system without regard
for power. In this mode, power consumption is a don't care. Things like fan speed and heat output of the
system may increase in addition to power consumption. Efficiency of the system may go down in this
mode but the absolute performance can go up depending on the benchmark that is run.
- A fifth setting, "Custom", allows the user to individually modify any of the low-level settings that are
preset and unchangeable in any of the other 4 preset modes.
- C-States:
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Enabling the CPU States causes the CPU to enter a low-power mode when the CPU is idle.
- Turbo Mode:
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Enabling turbo mode can boost the overall CPU performance when all CPU cores are not being fully utilized.
- COD Preference:
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COD (Cluster-On-Die) splits the cores/caches into two halves. This improves performance for some applications. Setting the COD preference to Enable does not guarantee that COD will always be enabled. COD is only enabled if the current hardware configuration allows it. Note, COD takes precedence over early snoop.