[jeffbee]

I don't like to speak about "throttling" because all modern CPUs are in a closed-loop control system where the capacity of one core-second varies. There is no question about whether your CPU is throttled. It is, always. That leads to all the uncertainty about the denominator. We know how many cycles passed while a certain thread had the CPU, but we don't have very good ways to estimate the number of cycles that were available. If you take the analysis one layer deeper, does a program that waits on main memory while chasing pointers randomly use 100% of the CPU, or does it waste 99% of it, since it's not using most of the execution resources? Such a program could be said to be using 100% CPU time, but it won't respond to higher CPU clock speeds. When waiting for loads it makes no difference if time passes at 4GHz or 400MHz.

So anyway, it is complicated.