X230 with Quad-Core (Intel Core i7-3612QE) is slow

[moerkey]

Hello,

I bought an X230 motherboard with quad-core (Intel Core i7-3612QE) from Asia and had Coreboot installed via the provider https://shop.vikings.net/product-category/coreboot-flashing-services/. Unfortunately, the system has now become much slower. The provider asked me to contact the developers of Coreboot. Is it possible that the Coreboot is not set for an Intel Core i7-3612QE on an X230?

I have created some benchmarks. Here are the results with Phoronix.

Quad-Core CPU-Governor OnDemand: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2311304-NE-KERNELDEM53
Quad-Core CPU-Governor Performance: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2311303-NE-KERNELPER02
Dual-Core CPU-Governor Performance: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2312226-NE-KERNELPER58

Here are also the tests via CLI under Linux with sysbench.

The tests ending with 1.txt were performed on the quad-core with conventional BIOS.
The tests ending with 2.txt were carried out on the quad-core with Coreboot & CPU-Governor OnDemand.
The tests ending with 3.txt were performed on the quad-core with Coreboot & CPU-Governor Performance.
The tests ending with 4.txt were carried out on the dual-core with conventional BIOS & CPU Governor Performance.

cpu1.txt
cpu2.txt
cpu3.txt
cpu4.txt
io1.txt
io2.txt
io3.txt
io4.txt
ram1.txt
ram2.txt
ram3.txt
ram4.txt

The RAM remained roughly the same speed on all systems.
The SSD remained the same speed on the quad-core with Coreboot, although the dual-core is a tick faster. This can be neglected.

The CPU has become drastically slower on the quad-core with Coreboot. The dual-core is a tick faster overall. However, this is due to the test and the CPU speed of 3.6 GHz compared to the quad-core.

The tests with sysbench can be carried out with the following commands.

sysbench --test=cpu run
sysbench --test=memory run
sysbench --test=fileio --file-test-mode=seqwr run

Thank you in advance.

Cheers

[merge]

well that's a question for coreboot upstream, i.e. https://ticket.coreboot.org/projects/coreboot but it's very well possible that the x230 board code assumes that the vendor-sold platforms, https://thinkwiki.de/X230 are being used.

[porterdcarnegie]

I did a few timed Linux 6.12 compilations on my Thinkpad x230, i7 3615QE. At first on a minimal linux distribution (KISS Linux) which resulted in 843 seconds with Coreboot and 847 seconds with original firmware (2.77). Notably, with Coreboot on Debian(testing), booted from a live USB, the kernel compiled in 505 seconds.

On KISS Linux the reported cache size and cpu speed are as follows:
/sys/devices/...cpu0.../index3/size reports 6144K
/proc/cpuinfo reports 3092 MHz during load

Both operating systems has performance governor set.

On KISS-linux with Coreboot, sysbench gets a score of 864, considerably lower than on Debian which scored 920.

[moerkey]

JFYI: I sold the device, so I am personally not interested in that topic anymore.