PC Power Management, ACPI Explained In Detail

DK writes "Computer performance has increased steadily in recent years, and unfortunately so has power consumption. An ultimate gaming system equipped with a quad-core processor, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 4 sticks of DDR2 memory, and a few hard drives can easily consume 500W without doing anything! To reduce power wastage, the industry standards APM and ACPI have been developed to make our computers work more efficiently. ACPI is the successor of APM and is explained in detail in this article."

Comments

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Noones computer idles at 500 Watts, not even close. I wish people would check their facts before posting nonsense.

My 4 year old xenon dual processor (Thats two physical CPUs) PC with (~10 fans) with no power management support in the CPUs idles at 200 watts including powering the display and extraneous trinkets attached to the watt meter plugged into my wall.

All new PCs with multiple cores on single processors have power management features and use concideribly less power when idling.

Whats worse is the article spouts all kinds of mostly useless techno crap about power states without providing any context into what it means or useful information in terms of actual OS power settings one can configure to do something about their PCs power usage.

Re:ACPI is a disaster

[Bert64]

Whats worse is that...
There is a standard for these ACPI scripts, as you pointed out it's not great but at least there is one. There's also a compiler for them, written by Intel that complies with the standard.
But most hardware makers don't use Intel's compiler that complies with standards... They use Microsoft's compiler that completely breaks the standards, thus OS authors can't just implement according to Intel's published standards, they have to reverse engineer Microsoft's unpublished variations.