On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 11:06:02PM +0100, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote: > Aren't you forgetting about CPUfreq governors? Which mean: use the > maximum CPU frequency when the system is busy, throttle down (or lower > voltage) when the system is idle. > > So yes, throttling will save the battery. > > Besides, not all CPUs support power management (voltage control).
Voltage scaling isn't the only component of CPU power management. Intels have supported low power states on idle since the Pentium 90 (Cyrix had "Suspend on HALT" earlier than that), which means that an idle processor takes less power than one executing code. On anything even vaguely modern, throttling will not save you any significant power compared to the C state support. > For example, a server that doesn't crunch any numbers at night will > certainly use less power when throttled. Have you got benchmark figures for this? -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
