[Discuss] AMD FX-8120 update

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Chuck Anderson <cra at wpi.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 04:27:07AM -0500, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:
>> The fact that the correct strategy for maximum performance may be
>> different from the best power management strategy is likely to require
>> new OS capabilities (changing the scheduling strategy based on power
>> management settings). If I have four things running on a desktop system
>> I'd likely prefer to spread them among all four modules for maximum
>> speed, but on a laptop I might prefer to put them on only two modules
>> and take the performance hit to get the power reduction of shutting off
>> the other two modules.
>
> I'm not so sure you would gain anything by shutting off modules.  It
> was found with CPU frequency governors that slowing down a processor
> actually used MORE power, because it took longer to complete running
> tasks.  It is better to have the CPU always run as fast as it can
> while there are running tasks, and then halt the processor when it is
> truley idle.

Depends on the kind of task.   Some tasks have time limits (viewing a
video)  rather then fixed computational goals.

Bill Bogstad