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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.
For example, an IBM PC with an Intel 80486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast (internally only) as one with the same CPU and memory running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors that implement different architectures and microarchitectures ...
In many cases programs may appear to be hung, but are making slow progress, and waiting a few minutes will allow the task to complete. Modern operating systems provide a mechanism for terminating hung processes, for instance, with the Unix kill command, or through a graphical means such as the Task Manager's "end task" button in Windows (select the particular process in the list and press "end ...
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.
For example, building the CPU out of better, faster transistors. However, sometimes pushing one type of performance to an extreme leads to a CPU with worse overall performance, because other important aspects were sacrificed to get one impressive-looking number, for example, the chip's clock rate (see the megahertz myth).
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.
Task Manager, previously known as Windows Task Manager, is a task manager, system monitor, and startup manager included with Microsoft Windows systems. It provides information about computer performance and running software, including names of running processes, CPU and GPU load, commit charge, I/O details, logged-in users, and Windows services.
Many operating systems, for example Windows, [1] Linux, [2] and macOS [3] will run an idle task, which is a special task loaded by the OS scheduler on a CPU when there is nothing for the CPU to do. The idle task can be hard-coded into the scheduler, or it can be implemented as a separate task with the lowest possible priority.