Calculate effective CPU clock frequency accounting for turbo boost and throttling.
Modern CPUs rarely run all cores at their advertised maximum turbo frequency simultaneously — thermal and power (TDP) limits mean all-core turbo is typically lower than single-core turbo, so only a fraction of cores can sustain the boosted clock under full load. This calculator models aggregate throughput as a GHz-equivalent sum: some cores running at the turbo frequency (base × boost factor) and the rest at base clock, which better approximates real sustained multi-threaded performance than naively multiplying base frequency by boost factor by total core count.
Aggregate throughput
aggregate = turbo_cores × (base_freq × boost_factor) + base_cores × base_freq
The advertised max turbo is typically a single-core (or few-core) boost limited by the chip's power and thermal budget. Loading every core simultaneously draws far more power, so the CPU's power management (governed by Intel Turbo Boost or AMD Precision Boost) lowers the sustained all-core frequency to stay within TDP.
`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz` shows per-core current frequency, and `watch -n1 'grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo'` lets you watch it change live under load. `cpupower frequency-info` gives a more detailed governor and scaling driver view.
Indirectly — the 'performance' governor keeps cores near maximum frequency more aggressively, while 'powersave' or 'ondemand'/'schedutil' scale down during idle periods, meaning actual sustained frequency under intermittent load can be lower than either base or turbo estimates used here.