CPU Director 2.3b6 Read Me
Copyright©1998-2007 by Newer Technology, Inc.  All rights reserved.

Warning: This software allows the user to set cache speeds that might be too fast for the hardware to handle. This will result in a crash. Read the installation instructions that came with your processor card to determine the fastest safe speed. If you use this on an Apple PowerMac with its original Apple CPU card (perhaps for benchmarking purposes), we recommend to not run the cache at speeds faster than the default setting for that CPU card. Proceed at your own risk.

Introduction
CPU Director allows you to view and configure the cache and processor clock speed settings on your PowerLogix upgrade card.  The included utilities allow you to enable or disable the cache "on the fly", change the speed at which your backside cache operates and automatically enable the cache at this speed at boot time.  If your upgrade uses an IBM 750FX or 750GX processor, you can also change the processor clock speed "on the fly" as well as the speed at which to set the processor when rebooting.  There are also options to disable speculative access (a problem with OldWorld machines that originally did not ship with a G3 or G4 processor) and enable dynamic power management.  Finally, if your upgrade uses multiple-processors, and you are running Mac OS X, you can view and change these settings on a per-processor basis.

CPU Director is compatible with both Mac OS 9.x and Mac OS X 10.2 or higher.  Note: DFS and Power Management functions require Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and require a PowerLogix 7447A or 7448 CPU card. If you purchased a PowerLogix 7447A CPU card prior to July 27, 2005 your card requires CPU Compatibility Updater, which will be sent to existing customers. (If you have a PowerLogix 7447A CPU card and the thermal pane does not appear in CPU Director, or Processor Performance does not appear in the Energy Saver System Preference, you need the CPU Director Compatibility Updater.)

CPU Director is not compatible with earlier versions of Mac OS X.  If you are running a version of Mac OS X below 10.2, you should upgrade using the "Software Update" System Preference panel.

Installation Instructions
To install CPU Director, simply drag the CPU Director folder onto your hard drive.  It is recommended that you drag it into your /Applications/ folder, however you may place it anywhere on the drive.  You must drag the entire CPU Director folder to your hard drive, not just the application itself.  Double-click the CPU Director application to launch it, and the software will automatically install its various components.  In order to install the software under Mac OS X, an administrator password is required, because a KEXT and Startup Item need to be installed.  No reboot is required - you may proceed to use CPU Director immediately.

Initial Configuration
Once you have successfully installed CPU Director, you should configure your cache settings as appropriate for your upgrade card.  To make changes under Mac OS X, you must click on the security lock icon in the upper right-hand corner of the window so that it becomes unlocked.  For security reasons, you will be prompted for an administrator password in order to change any settings.  Under Mac OS 9, no special authentication is required.

Now, configure your upgrade card settings, essentially choosing an appropriate ratio, whether to enable/disable speculative access, whether to enable dynamic power management and, for 750FX/750GX upgrades, what PLL settings you wish to use.  Refer to your PowerLogix upgrade card user manual for more information on what settings are appropriate for your particular upgrade card.  Quitting the application will save these settings, allowing the upgrade card to automatically be configured with these settings on subsequent boots.

Note that when used with a 7450, 7451, 7455 or 7457 CPU upgrade, you will generally not want to change the L3 cache settings from the default configuration.  CPU Director should, in most cases, automatically determine the appropriate L3 settings for your upgrade card.  You may disable or enable the cache at will, however, which is useful for benchmarking purposes.

Energy Conservation
On some machines, mainly notebooks, it may be desirable to conserve battery power.  If you set the Mac OS Energy Saver preferences panel to use "Reduced Processor Performance", Mac OS may disable your caches to conserve power. For maximum energy savings, you should verify with CPU Director that the caches are in fact disabled.  Conversely, if you find that your cache is not being enabled at boot time even though you have it properly configured, check that you have not reduced your processor speed in the Energy Saver panel.

For maximum energy conservation, you should also make sure that dynamic power management has been enabled.  Dynamic power management allows the processor to cut power to units in the CPU when they are idle.  This results in less power use as well as a cooler-running processor.  Dynamic power management does not result in a performance degradation and thus it is recommended that it always be enabled.  On some older Macintosh models, it may not be enabled automatically by the firmware, ROM or Mac OS, so it is recommended that you use CPU Director to ensure that it is properly enabled at boot time.

PowerPC 7447A upgrades support a new feature called "dynamic frequency switching" (DFS).  DFS allows the processor to be slowed to half its regular speed to conserve power while the processor is idle.  DFS is enabled by selecting the desired processor speed in the Energy Saver preference panel.  By selecting "Reduced", the processor will always run at half its regular speed.  Conversely, by selecting "Highest" the processor will run at maximum speed.  By selecting "Automatic", the processor will switch between reduced and highest performance based on CPU demand.  "Automatic" is the recommended setting.  DFS is only available on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and later, and it only works on CPU cards configured with integer bus ratios. (DFS works by cutting the PLL ratio in half. For example, a 1500 MHz CPU with 100 MHz bus is a 15:1 ratio. Half of 15 is 7.5, so when DFS is active, the clock speed with be 750 MHz. However, if the machine is set to 1800 MHz with 133 MHz bus, for example, this is a 13.5:1 ratio, which is not an integer. A bus ratio of 6.75:1, is not possible, so DFS will not work in that case.)

PowerPC 750FX and 750GX upgrades support a feature called "dual-PLLs".  These processors have two software-configurable PLLs that control the speed at which the processor runs.  This feature also works in conjunction with the Energy Saver control panel.  One PLL is configured as a slow speed to be used when the processor is idle.  The other PLL is configured as the fast speed to be used when the processor is busy.  This feature allows the processor speed to be automatically turned down when the processor is idle in order to save power and reduce energy consumption.  This results in a cooler-running processor, particularly important on notebook computers.  In order to use this feature, you set the fast processor speed using CPU Director under the PLL tab (the slow speed is automatically set to be 500 MHz) to the speed at which your upgrade is rated.  Then, you can select which speed the computer runs at by using the Energy Saver preferences panel.  "Highest" corresponds to the setting selected in CPU Director, "Reduced" corresponds to the automatically-configured 500 MHz setting and "Automatic" will result in the slow setting being used when the computer is idle and the fast setting being used the rest of the time.

Speculative Access
Speculative access is a feature of G3 and G4 processors that allows the computer to perform some operations before it is known whether or not that particular operation actually needs to be performed.  By doing some operations ahead of time, the processor can better make use of its resources, resulting in increased performance.  However, if your machine did not originally ship with a G3 or G4 processor, a problem with the Apple ROMs prevents speculative access from working properly, possibly resulting in disk corruption or even a failure to boot the machine.  It is recommended that if your computer did not originally ship with a G3 or G4 processor speculative access should be disabled.  This will result in a slight performance degradation, but is not noticeable in real-world applications and real-world benchmarks.  Conversely, if your machine did ship with a G3 or G4 processor, you may enable speculative access as you see fit.

De-installation Instructions (Mac OS 9)
To de-install CPU Director from Mac OS 9, drag both the "CPU Director INIT" file from your Extensions folder and the "CPU Director" application folder into the trash and then reboot your machine.  CPU Director has now been fully de-installed.

De-installation Instructions (Mac OS X)
To de-install CPU Director under Mac OS X, a script is included to delete the various support files.  To completely remove it from your hard drive, open a terminal window using the Terminal application found in 'Applications/Utilities/Terminal' and then type the following:

sudo sh  

(with a space after the "sh"--don't press return yet).  Then, drag the Deinstall.sh file from the 'CPU Director/Support Files/OS X/' folder onto that terminal window to get the full path to the script.  Finally, press return.  You will be prompted for an administrator password and then all CPU Director files will be unloaded from RAM and removed from your hard drive.

Troubleshooting
Under Mac OS X, in the unlikely event that these utilities cause your machine to lock up at boot time while displaying the message "Probing L2 cache", CPU Director will permanently disable itself and you must reboot your machine.  At this point, you may wish to look at the log file in '/System/Library/StartupItems/PowerLogix Startup/Log.txt'.  This log file will tell you at which point in the boot process CPU Director crashed.  You should then launch the CPU Director application and ensure that the cache and PLL settings are appropriate for your upgrade card.  Launching CPU Director will also re-enable the KEXT and Startup Item, allowing your now corrected cache settings to again take effect at boot time.  Note that with later versions of Mac OS X, the text "Probing L2 Cache" may not be displayed while CPU Director is initially configuring the cache.  If you experience a crash at boot time it is recommended that you launch CPU Director to verify that it is properly configured and has not disabled itself.

Also, when trying to authenticate to install or update the KEXT, if your date and time on your computer are not set properly, CPU Director will fail the installation or update with the error message "Failed to load new KEXT version."  Correcting the date and time in your System Preferences control panel will solve this problem.

Under Mac OS X 10.4, the OS is very aggressive during the boot process and tries to load the Finder as quickly as possible.  In this case, Startup Items, including the PLKEXT, may not have finished loading by the time the Finder is ready for use if the machine is set to boot directly into the Finder rather than to the Login window.  CPU Director can become confused if it is run before the PLKEXT has finished loading, so it is best to wait 20 or 30 seconds before launching CPU Director after a fresh boot.  This problem will be addressed in a future release.

Known Issues
When you update to this version of CPUD on a 750FX or 750GX upgrade, the PLL's fast speed is reset to 500 MHz (although the boot setting is preserved).  Please go to the PLL tab and set the PLL's fast speed to the desired setting after first installing CPUD.

Version History
2.3b6 (4 May 2007)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.9
2.3b5 (2 October 2006)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.7 and OS X 10.4.8.
2.3b4 (11 April 2006)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.6. Also new icon set added for application.
2.3b3 (27 Mar 2006)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.5.
2.3b2 (11 Jan 2006)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.4.
2.3b1 (1 Nov 2005)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.3.
2.2b1 (13 Sept 2005)	- Correct problem where execute permissions might not be set properly on executable tools used by CPUD, causing installation problems and causing any attempts to change the processor's settings to fail.
		- Added 7448 support.
2.1 (25 July 2005)	- Added dual-PLL support.
		- Corrected a problem where the thermal pane would not work properly on Mirrored Drive Doors, Quicksilver and Digital Audio models.
		- Corrected a problem where thermal polling would not work properly with OS X 10.3.9.
		- Revised installation process.
2.1b1 (15 July 2005)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.2.
		- Added DFS support.
2.0b4 (4 June 2005)	- Added support for OS X 10.4.1.
		- Fixed a rare kernel panic.
2.0b1 (30 Apr 2005)	- Added support for OS X 10.4 Tiger.
2.0a1 (24 Feb 2005)	- Added support for I2C thermal sensors and fan control.
		- Added 7447A support.
1.5f6 (6 July 2004)	- Allow 750GX PLL options up to 1133 MHz on desktop machines.  Be careful not to overclock your processor.
1.5f5 (3 June 2004)	- Added new options for how to configure the caches at restart time:
			Enable	- force the cache to be on.
			Disable	- force the cache to be off.
			Firmware	- leave the cache however ROM set it up.
		If your cache was previously set to enable at startup, then it now forces the cache on at boot time.  If your cache was not set to enable at startup, it will now default to the firmware setting.  You may want to update your cache settings if this is not what you want.
		- 750GX processors can now select 1GHz as a PLL option on desktop machines.
1.5f1 (12 Apr 2004)	- Updated to support 750GX processors.
		- Fixed a kernel panic when executing "sysctl -a" from the command line.
1.4f1 (27 Feb 2004)	- Updated support for new 7457 cache ratios.
		- Fixed some problems with the OS 9 version of the software.
1.2f2 (22 Aug 2003)	- Added support for new half-integer CPU ratios in updated 7455 and 7457 CPUs.
1.1f1 (16 June 2003)	- Fixed problem where the PowerLogix Startup item would not properly honor the 7400/7410 "Enable on restart" setting under OS X.
1.0f1 (Apr/May 2003)	- First public release.