Computers as Components, 2nd Edition

3.6 CPU Power Consumption 129

we can have very dramatic changes in the cache contents. We need to examine the

behavior of the programs running on the system to be able to accurately estimate

performance when caches are involved. We consider this problem in more detail in

Section 5.6.

3.6 CPU POWER CONSUMPTION

Power consumption is, in some situations, as important as execution time. In this

section we study the characteristics of CPUs that influence power consumption and

mechanisms provided by CPUs to control how much power they consume.

First, it is important to distinguish between energy and power. Power is, of

course, energy consumption per unit time. ...