[hinkley]

My laptop has been throttling itself for a while, I recently discovered. I had been trying to benchmark some code changes and have given up and am letting the CI machine run them, because my numbers are all over the place and go down with each run.

[bee_rider]

One option would be to go into BIOS and see if there's some way of just locking your CPU to one of the lower clock speeds. This will give lower benchmarking numbers of course, but at least they should be fairly stable. (in Linux, it also often possible to tinker with frequencies while the system is running).

Even on a desktop this sort of thing is sometimes necessary, for example my CPU has different clock speeds depending on how many processors are running, so I have to lock it to the all-core clock if I want to see proper parallel speedups.

This might be annoying for day-to-day usage (although, CPUs really are insanely performant nowadays so maybe it will not be too bad).