PowerTOP is a software
utility
In economics, utility is a measure of a certain person's satisfaction from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used with at least two meanings.
* In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish ...
designed to measure, explain and minimise a computer's
electrical power
Electric power is the rate of transfer of electrical energy within a electric circuit, circuit. Its SI unit is the watt, the general unit of power (physics), power, defined as one joule per second. Standard prefixes apply to watts as with oth ...
consumption.
It was released by
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
in 2007 under the
GPLv2 license. It works for
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
,
AMD,
ARM and
UltraSPARC processors.
PowerTOP analyzes the programs,
device driver
In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...
s, and
kernel options running on a computer based on the
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
and
Solaris operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s, and estimates the power consumption resulting from their use.
This information may be used to pinpoint software that results in excessive power use. This is particularly useful for
laptop computer
A laptop computer or notebook computer, also known as a laptop or notebook, is a small, portable personal computer (PC). Laptops typically have a Clamshell design, clamshell form factor (design), form factor with a flat-panel computer scree ...
users who wish to prolong battery life, and
data center operators, for whom electrical and cooling costs are a major expenditure.
Usage
The original focus was on
CPU sleep states, and showing the programs or drivers responsible for "wakeups" which prevent CPUs entering sleep states. A database of known problems automatically provides more user friendly "tips" for specific sources of wakeups. However, it also shows information on
CPU frequency scaling. Over time the database has been expanded to include tips on a wide range of power consumption issues.
Project activity
The latest release of PowerTOP (version 2.15) was made public on September 29, 2022. The project is hosted on
GitHub
GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
.
See also
*
Power management
Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power ...
*
Green computing
*
LatencyTOP
*
top (software)
*
Run-time estimation of system and sub-system level power consumption
References
External links
*
Version Control RepositoryPowertop for OpenSolaris– part of Project Tesla
{{DEFAULTSORT:Powertop
Linux process- and task-management-related software
Computers and the environment