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Idle is a state that a computer processor is in when it is not being used by any program. Every program or task that runs on a computer system occupies a certain amount of processing time on the CPU. If the CPU has completed all tasks it is idle. Modern processors use idle time to save power.
In many applications, the CPU and other components are idle much of the time, so idle power contributes significantly to overall system power usage. When the CPU uses power management features to reduce energy use, other components, such as the motherboard and chipset, take up a larger proportion of the computer's energy.
In Windows NT operating systems, the System Idle Process contains one or more kernel threads which run when no other runnable thread can be scheduled on a CPU. In a multiprocessor system, there is one idle thread associated with each CPU core. For a system with hyperthreading enabled, there is an idle thread for each logical processor.
The largest power consuming subsystems in computer servers are the processor, memory and disk. Servers also have idle energy consumption which sometimes can be large, but it is static and it can be measured. Power models are presented for each of subsystems CPU, memory and disk in reference [18] in detail. This power model is the core technique ...
ACPI 1.0 (1996) defines a way for a CPU to go to idle "C states", but defines no frequency-scaling system.. ACPI 2.0 (2000) introduces a system of P states (power-performance states) that a processor can use to communicate its possible frequency–power settings to the OS.
An idle computer has a load number of 0 (the idle process is not counted). Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Each process that terminates decrements it by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states.
A finned air cooled heatsink with fan clipped onto a CPU, with a smaller passive heatsink without fan in the background A 3-fan heatsink mounted on a video card to maximize cooling efficiency of the GPU and surrounding components Commodore 128DCR computer's switch-mode power supply, with a user-installed 60 mm cooling fan.
Different software is used by different motherboards. There are also third-party programs that work on a variety of motherboards and allow wide customization of fan behavior depending on temperature readings from the motherboard, CPU, and GPU sensors, as well as allowing manual control. Two such programs are SpeedFan [11] and Argus Monitor. [12]