Linux: Understanding Power Consumption

“‘What’s eating the battery life of my laptop?’ Arjan van de Ven
rhetorically asked in an announcement about a new PowerTOP utility
released by Intel for detecting what Linux programs and kernel
tunables are resulting in the most power consumption. ‘Why isn’t it
many more hours? Which software component causes the most power to
be burned? These are important questions without a good answer…
until now.’ Arjan went on to describe the new tickless kernel
feature that was merged in 2.6.21-rc1 [story] noting that it can
help reduce power consumption by allowing the CPU to remain idle
for longer periods, ‘current processors save a lot of power if they
are idle for long periods, which translates into a longer battery
life for your laptop, or a lower energy bill for your
datacenter…'”

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