Why does the CPU of the Eee appear to run at 630MHz?
Because it does; it’s a 900MHz Celeron M ULV chip that is underclocked to 630MHz. At the time of writing (Nov07) the BIOS for the Eee locks the front-side-bus (FSB) at 70MHz instead of the expected 100MHz. This reduces the Eee’s speed, although it’s still adequate for most tasks. Note that the Eee’s Linux operating system misreports the speed of the Eee’s processor as 900MHz. The cause of this appears to be the p4-clockmod kernel module; once this is removed, the processor speed is reported accurately. The EEE has been benchmarked with the module present in the kernel and without; the results were the same for either case.2) If you run Windows XP, you’ll see the CPU speed reported accurately as 630MHz in System Properties. Note that the 2G Surf model has a slightly different CPU: it’s an 800MHz Celeron M underclocked to 570MHz, and does not have the Level II cache included with the higher model CPUs.
