Crazy behaviour with MBP 2020 (intel) CPU gets stuck between 300mhz and 1ghz

[Tony01]

I have a MBP 2020 (intel i5, 16gb ram) and recently this very strange behaviour started happening: the macbook will slow down like crazy for few seconds and then it goes back to normal.

Sometimes the cpu will get stuck between 300mhz and 1ghz and it becomes barely usable.

I downloaded Intel Power Gadget and made a screenshot so that you can see the behaviour of the CPU:

I tried resetting SMC but it didn't help. I'm running Bir Sur 11.5.1.

What is wrong with it?

 

[twanj]

Does Activity Monitor show anything taking up lots of CPU?

 

[Tony01]

Does Activity Monitor show anything taking up lots of CPU?

Nope. I noticed that when I deattached the usb c hub this behaviour stopped.
Could it be the cause?

 

[Tony01]

It’s still happening. I will try with a clean install

 

[gilby101]

Sometimes the cpu will get stuck between 300mhz and 1ghz and it becomes barely usable.

In your first screenshot the recorded CPU frequencies are from the minimum 0.6 GHz and maximum 1.7 GHz. The lower values on the graph are, I suspect, where the Power Gadget has not got any measurement. The times also correspond to zero values of core power. Similar comments for 2nd screenshot.

Thats not to deny you have a problem. Just the the Power Gadget only indicates that it was unable to read values and so suffered from the problem.

So you come back to using Activity Monitor (or some similar tool) as first attempt to discover what is causing the problem. If that fails, it is a matter of searching Console logs - best of luck with that unless you are experienced with Console!

 

[gilby101]

It’s still happening. I will try with a clean install

An erase disk and reinstall type of clean install, I hope. Without recovering apps and settings from Time Machine.

That is what Apple would ask you to do if you were to use Apple Support.