Comment 15 for bug 183033

No, scaling was per-core on Gutsy. I have two core 2 duo machines here, one on Gutsy and one on Hardy. Both machines when running Gutsy act the same regarding CPU scaling. I used the output from two machines to avoid swapping hard disks and rebooting.

On Gutsy each CPU had it's own cpufreq directory:
# ls -l /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu* | grep cpufreq
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 0 2008-02-05 16:48 cpufreq
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 0 2008-02-05 16:48 cpufreq

On Hardy, the second CPU shares the first (I would assume the same would be true in a quad-core system)
# ls -l /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu* | grep cpufreq
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 0 Feb 5 15:24 cpufreq
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Feb 5 16:39 cpufreq -> ../../../../devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq

To test scaling, I ran the command `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/null`. While this was going, I checked CPU speed

On Gutsy, cores scale separately:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz
cpu MHz : 1596.000
cpu MHz : 2394.000

On Hardy they scale together:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz
cpu MHz : 2200.000
cpu MHz : 2200.000

On Gutsy you can also set a different scaling governor on a per-cpu basis (one performance, the other powersave) and it would act accordingly.