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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.
However, the idle process does not use up computer resources (even when stated to be running at a high percent). Its CPU time "usage" is a measure of how much CPU time is not being used by other threads. In Windows 2000 and later the threads in the System Idle Process are also used to implement CPU power saving.
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.
Big Picture mode is a 10-foot user interface, which optimizes the Steam display to work on high-definition televisions, allowing the user to control Steam with a gamepad or with a keyboard and mouse. Gabe Newell stated that Big Picture mode was a step towards a dedicated Steam entertainment hardware unit. [139]
The dynamic power (switching power) dissipated by a chip is C·V 2 ·A·f, where C is the capacitance being switched per clock cycle, V is voltage, A is the activity factor [1] indicating the average number of switching events per clock cycle by the transistors in the chip (as a unitless quantity) and f is the clock frequency.
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.
The CPU core voltage (V CORE) is the power supply voltage supplied to the processing cores of CPU (which is a digital circuit), GPU, or any other device with a processing core. The amount of power a CPU uses, and thus the amount of heat it dissipates, is the product of this voltage and the current it draws.
CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time that a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions of a computer program or operating system. CPU time is measured in clock ticks or seconds. Sometimes it is useful to convert CPU time into a percentage of the CPU capacity, giving the CPU usage.