Processor energy management in Windows 7

Question

What does it mean to set the cpu's top performance at 60% under a Windows 7 power plan?

I have an intel atom processor at 1.66Ghz, does that mean it will act as underclocked at 1.00Ghz? Or are there other factors to consider?

Answer 1

Very simply: It means that Windows will try to tell your CPU to lower the clock to 1.00 Ghz.

But that's only assuming your CPU supports it; if it doesn't, it'll clock down to the nearest value.

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You can use different tools to see how much your computer is actually clocking down:

• (Built-in, GUI): Resource Monitor: Go to Task Manager->Performance->Resource monitor, and you can see the % Maximum Frequency that it's displaying.

• (Built-in, Console): Go to the command prompt and type in WMIC and then CPU, and take a look at the CurrentClockSpeed and CurrentVoltage columns.

• (Third-party, GUI): Download Speccy, it'll give you more information than you ever even wanted to know. :)

Answer 2

Windows is using Intel's SpeedStep feature to do this. Intel has a full explanation of how SpeedStep works on their website. The Wikipedia article is also very informative. I don't know what more specific information you're looking for than what Sandeep already told you, but one of those sources likely has it. Intel's Atom Processor info page might also have the info you're looking for somewhere in their technical documents.

Answer 3

My answer concerns rather the power-management features of Windows 7, and not the hardware.

Toshiba's How to handle the power managment features of Windows 7 describes the Advanced power settings in the Power Options applet of the Control Panel:

Processor power management

Minimum processor state

Specifies the lower limit of CPU performance, as a percentage of the full potential performance of the CPU. Higher values promote higher performance (depending on CPU utilization), at the expense of greater power consumption.

Maximum processor state

Specifies the upper limit of CPU performance, as a percentage of the full potential performance of the CPU. Higher values promote higher performance (depending on CPU utilization), at the expense of greater power consumption. The minimum and maximum processor state values are essentially percentage of the maximum clock rate for the CPU, though other factors may be involved. For further details, see Microsoft's document Processor Power Management in Windows 7.

The mentioned Microsoft document can be found here : Processor Power Management in Windows 7, which also mentions :

Core Parking
helps improve the energy efficiency of a system by dynamically scaling the number of logical processors that are in use based on workload.

Processor Clocking Control
Windows is not in direct control of the processor’s performance state, but instead communicates its performance state preference to the underlying platform hardware. This is used for fine-tuning hardware systems such as Intel's SpeedStep.

Answer 4

Most if not all CPUs have power saving features, Intel with Speedstep and AMD with Cool n Quiet, which can be enabled/disabled in the BIOS (most likely not being able to be changed in laptop BIOS)

setting your processor at a max of 60% in the speed setting will set it to 60% of the actual speed of the CPU.

Each stepping from 0-100% has voltage changes, therefore sticking your CPU to 60% will underclock your CPU and also provide a lower voltage than used in the max CPU clock thus saving power.

Looking here: intel.ly/6Gm0EV -- It shows that it's voltage ranges are 0.800V-1.175V I have tried having a look around the net but I can't seem to give you exact information about the steppings of speedstep. You can try booting into a live ubuntu CD and entering "cat /proc/cpuinfo" into a terminal to see what it outputs.

Hope that helps.