[Tfug] "Normal" ondemand governor usage?

[Claude Rubinson]

I was just reviewing Matthew Garrett's "good practices" for power
management (http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/power/good_practices.html)
and one of the things that he discusses is that one should use the
ondemand power governor.  I do, but only very rarely does my cpu go
above 600MHz (it's an Intel Pentium M that runs up to 1.2GHz).  For
example, when starting up Firefox (Iceweasel), the cpu will briefly
jump to 1200MHz and then return to 600.  Even when I run fairly
intensive statistical analyses (RAM tends to be the bigger issue here)
or watch video, the processor sticks to 600MHz.

I've always just assumed this was because the processor simply wasn't
being taxed but after reading Garrett's comments, I'm wondering if
this is correct.  Should my processor be bursting more frequently?
More to the point: How can I know if something's normal/buggy with my
cpu frequency scaling?

Thanks,

Claude