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It looks to me like it's just a relaunched version of Intel Powertop with better marketing behind it.

Regardless, Powertop actually is a useful tool, and it's helped me get much better battery life out of my T61 running Ubuntu.

Hmmm. This is awesome news. The last 40 or so systems we purchased were all Intel based purely because of the fact that they were so much less trouble due to being supported with Free drivers. This changes the equation though. It sounds from the announcement that we'll be getting better quality drivers because AMD/ATI will be releasing the full specs and not merely documenting through the use of code (which is cool and still makes Intel supportable).

Some things I still wonder about are whether or not the comparably priced AMD/ATI systems will have good Free drivers for other integral components such as wireless (which Intel have also got a lead with due to their IPW3945ABG). Intel have also got some very important work underway with PowerTOP. The upcoming Fedora 8 will be benefiting from the results of extensive testing with PowerTOP (which is written by ex-Red Hatter, now Intel employee, Arjan van de Ven). This allows monitoring of the major drains of power in laptops and can also be a major factor in server rooms.

I'm delighted by this whole move and it means that I can now make recommendations which include ATI cards as part of the specifications to purchasing. In terms of whether the AMD/ATI platform as whole will be a competitor that depends on whether the AMD motherboard chipsets will also be as open, Free and supportable. Intel have an incredible headstart in this area and possibly this will prevent them from moving into the stand-alone 3D card market (which is what I thought was going to inevitably happen). It looked as though AMD/ATI were headed for extinction, but I guess the reality of sales started to catch up with them.

All in all good news that opens up some more options for us. Perhaps we'll be seeing some interesting Dell machines soon!

I would massively analyze all of the code in applications and the kernel with PowerTOP. PowerTOP is a tool made by Intel that monitors how much energy each application uses over time. Performance per watt is the name of the game. Linux developers need to use this tool to profile all of the applications and modules to shrink the Linux energy footprint. This will give Linux and the associated suite of applications tremendous appeal for laptops, embedded devices, servers, and the ever shrinking desktop computer.

It's amazing some of the things the PowerTOP team have found so far. Things like the blinking cursor of a GVIM sending an interrupt that brings the CPU out of sleep. Even the most innocuous applications can contribute to significant energy waste. We are talking about over 50% improvements in the energy efficiency of a computer with a few simple changes in the software.

Imagine if all of the applications in the default distribution were fixed to avoid unnecessary power drains. First of all, the performance would be better. Second of all, the energy savings would be so huge over Windows it would be insane to use anything but Linux on a laptop or server. With any hope distributions will start using PowerTOP to evaluate whether applications are ready to get merged into the distribution so users can feel safe they can install applications and not sacrifice battery life or energy efficiency in the data center.

I would massively analyze all of the code in applications and the kernel with PowerTOP. PowerTOP is a tool made by Intel that monitors how much energy each application uses over time. Performance per watt is the name of the game. Linux developers need to use this tool to profile all of the applications and modules to shrink the Linux energy footprint. This will give Linux and the associated suite of applications tremendous appeal for laptops, embedded devices, servers, and the ever shrinking desktop computer.

It's amazing some of the things the PowerTOP team have found so far. Things like the blinking cursor of a GVIM sending an interrupt that brings the CPU out of sleep. Even the most innocuous applications can contribute to significant energy waste. We are talking about over 50% improvements in the energy efficiency of a computer with a few simple changes in the software.

Imagine if all of the applications in the default distribution were fixed to avoid unnecessary power drains. First of all, the performance would be better. Second of all, the energy savings would be so huge over Windows it would be insane to use anything but Linux on a laptop or server. With any hope distributions will start using PowerTOP to evaluate whether applications are ready to get merged into the distribution so users can feel safe they can install applications and not sacrifice battery life or energy efficiency in the data center.

I would massively analyze all of the code in applications and the kernel with PowerTOP. PowerTOP is a tool made by Intel that monitors how much energy each application uses over time. Performance per watt is the name of the game. Linux developers need to use this tool to profile all of the applications and modules to shrink the Linux energy footprint. This will give Linux and the associated suite of applications tremendous appeal for laptops, embedded devices, servers, and the ever shrinking desktop computer.

It's amazing some of the things the PowerTOP team have found so far. Things like the blinking cursor of a GVIM sending an interrupt that brings the CPU out of sleep. Even the most innocuous applications can contribute to significant energy waste. We are talking about over 50% improvements in the energy efficiency of a computer with a few simple changes in the software.

Imagine if all of the applications in the default distribution were fixed to avoid unnecessary power drains. First of all, the performance would be better. Second of all, the energy savings would be so huge over Windows it would be insane to use anything but Linux on a laptop or server. With any hope distributions will start using PowerTOP to evaluate whether applications are ready to get merged into the distribution so users can feel safe they can install applications and not sacrifice battery life or energy efficiency in the data center.

It's called Inotify. Everything and its mom uses it on Linux nowadays...

The PowerTop folks have been going around and finding a lot of programs that do polling rather than asynchronous notification, and fixing them to use things like inotify.

To elaborate on the parent's post, p4-clockmod doesn't actually change the core clock of the CPU. All it does is force the CPU to run idle more of the time when it's in use.

p4-clockmod will actually end up causing you to use more power since it's usually more efficient to get the work done faster at a higher CPU utilization and it takes a bit of time for p4-clockmod to "ramp up" the virtual clockspeed again.

If you're running the latest kernel (2.6.21 or later) with dynticks enabled, you can install and run PowerTop which will let you identify programs and configuration issues which prevent your CPU from reaching the lowest power states.

Did you read the Tips and Tricks? I can't tell.

Success Stories

"With PowerTOP, I managed to increase the battery life of my Panasonic R4 laptop from 4 to almost 7 hours" -- Keith Packard, Principal Engineer at Intel

Guess you could accuse him of bias...

Useful link for saving power on Intel hardware: http://www.linuxpowertop.org/index.php