From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Mar 27 22:57:41 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from lists.blarg.net (lists.blarg.net [206.124.128.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 240C737B499 for ; Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:57:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from thig.blarg.net (thig.blarg.net [206.124.128.18]) by lists.blarg.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id CD918BD1F; Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:57:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost.localdomain ([206.124.139.115]) by thig.blarg.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA17255; Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:57:26 -0800 Received: (from jojo@localhost) by localhost.localdomain (8.11.6/8.11.3) id g2S6u6681761; Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:56:06 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from swear@blarg.net) To: "Seth Hieronymus" Cc: Subject: Re: processor question References: From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) Date: 27 Mar 2002 22:56:06 -0800 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <3h663hi3jt.63h@localhost.localdomain> Lines: 13 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.1 (Cuyahoga Valley) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org "Seth Hieronymus" 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