On Tue, 30 May 2000, Jukka Marin wrote:

> consumption to a fraction of the normal level.  Wouldn't an idle loop like
> this keep the CPU fully (well, almost) active all the time, raising the
> power consumption to normal levels?
Usually, no. That is, "slowdown" modes usually come in after some time the
system is unused by the USER. In other words, it counts the time you don't
move the mouse, touch the keyboard, not how much CPU is idle. I say
usually, for at least one (crusoe) chip does measure the cpu consumption
and act consequently. I don't know others. On i386 (and many other
achitectures) if the cpu is idle, it's actually running an "idle loop"
anyway (or, if the OS wants, do something like flush caches, zero unused
memory, so on).


Hope this helps!