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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

On MacOS Low-Power mode in the Power section of system settings disables turbo-boost. On Linux

    echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

does the rick. Note that this is not the same as power-saving mode in Gnome settings.

I have found that for heavy C++ compilation that lasts for many minutes the slowdown was about 20% on my ThinkPad X1 laptop. The big plus is that it made the laptop almost silent.

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I think you're running into changing the governor mode here, which is a related but different part of the same ballpark. Modern Intel even has a "bias hint" allowed in addition to just a governor, where the user can help tell the power saving features what tradeoffs they prefer; power-saving mode is an additional limitation in conjunction with SpeedStep (or Turbo) P-state use; if the laptop is almost silent (no fans) you're surely clocking it down to avoid heat/thermal buildup (no fans) - this is usually used to conserve/extend battery to the max possible, at the expense of CPU clock speed.

The Arch Wiki has a nice page outlining all of it, there's a lot of knobs to twiddle. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_frequency_scaling

It is Gnome Power setting dialog changes the governor. The above command just disables Turbo boost while allowing CPU to spend 100% of its time at the base frequency.

Any way to do it on Windows without getting into BIOS?

You can use tools like ThrottleStop [0]

I use it on my laptop and run it to disable turbo boost most of the time -interestingly for performance reasons. Turbo boost leads to very erratic behaviour on laptops when you have long running CPU-intensive tasks (e.g. the cores run hot and it has to throttle down hard to cool them down again).

[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlesto...

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