Date: 27 Mar 2002 22:56:06 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: "Seth Hieronymus" <sethh@principia.edu> Cc: <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: processor question Message-ID: <3h663hi3jt.63h@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <OE100msHHbbgCzQ50pF00005549@hotmail.com> References: <OE100msHHbbgCzQ50pF00005549@hotmail.com>
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"Seth Hieronymus" <sethh@principia.edu> writes: > Do processors use more power / produce more heat when they are doing > processing other than an idle loop? Current-day processors use an extra bit of power every time the state of one of the millions of gizmos (groups of a few transistors) on the chip changes. There are a few parts of the chip that are always changing at a fixed rate (ie, the clock parts) but other parts (floating point and integer sub-processors, registers, etc) have gizmo-state-changing happening a lot or a little, depending on what is being computed, and most (?) processors can be configured to shut down most sections of the chip into a kind of "hold" state during idle, or not. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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