3 Ways That Windows is Smarter With Power
With great power comes... great management?
Typically laptop users are the ones who care most about power consumption, as it directly affects battery life, but it's also a full-on concern for those who are looking at their energy bills – and this includes massive corporations where pennies can multiply into thousands of dollars.
Windows 8 will have a host of new features that make the user experience more productive and enjoyable, but under the hood will be further efforts in efficient and effective power management.
Pat Stemen, a program manager on the Windows Kernel team, detailed on the B8 Blog three innovations in Windows 8 that influence power consumption: the Metro style app model, idle hygiene, and a new runtime device power management framework.
On the Metro style app model:
The Metro style application model is designed from the beginning to be power-friendly. The power management benefit is that the model makes it easy for developers to ensure their application is running only at the right time—applications in the background are suspended such that they do not consume resources and power when not in use.
Of course, we recognize that background activity is a critical component of apps that are always connected and responsive. The Metro style application model and the underlying WinRT support background activity through a new set of capabilities called background tasks. … Background tasks make it easy to perform background activity in a power-friendly fashion. They also enable developers to continue to deliver responsiveness and “freshness” in their applications, but the mechanisms are different than the existing Win32 model because of the desire for a fast-and-fluid interface and the other key attributes of Metro style apps….
On idle hygiene:
Most PC platforms feature processor and chipset idle states that allow the hardware platform to stop the clock or completely turn off power to parts of the silicon when they are unused. These idle states are absolutely critical to enabling long battery life, but they require a minimal residency duration—that is, you have to be idle for long enough to make the transition in and out of the idle state worthwhile in terms of power used. This is because some power is consumed on the way into and out of the idle state. Software most effectively uses these idle states when there are as few exits from the idle state as possible, and the duration of the idle state is as long as possible.
We track the idle efficiency of Windows 8 using built-in ETW Tracing, some additions to the Windows Performance Analyzer, and a basic histogram. Below, you can see the difference in idle durations between Windows 7 and Windows 8. When the screen is on, we’ve already moved the bar significantly from a maximum idle duration of 15.6ms in Windows 7 to 35% of our durations longer than 100ms in Windows 8! With the screen off and during Connected Standby, our idle durations are even longer, currently in the tens of seconds.
On runtime device power management:
For Windows 8, we’ve built a new device power framework that allows all devices to advertise their power management capabilities and integrate them with a special driver called the Power Engine Plug-in or PEP, designed for SoC systems. The PEP is provided by the silicon manufacturer and knows all of the SoC-specific power management requirements. This allows device drivers like our USB host controller or a keyboard driver to be built once, and still deliver optimal power management on all platforms from SoC-based PCs to datacenter servers.
- Microsoft,
- Microsoft Windows,
- msft ,
- windows-8 ,
- power ,
- management ,
- win8
- XFX adds 1,000+ Watt PSUs to Its ProSeries
- The $79 Kindle Costs Amazon $84 to Make
- Star Trek Online Going Free-to-Play in January 2012
- Mathematicians Calculate 10 Trillion Digits of Pi With Xeons
- OCZ reveals the PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III Series PSUs
- Estonian Clickjacking Ring Totally Busted
- Deals Nov 11: Dell Inspiron 15 Core i3 2.53GHz $349
- RAMCloud: The Idea of Storing All Data in RAM
- Microsoft Receives Quantum Computing Patent
- Modern Warfare 3 Rakes It In: $400 Million in 24 Hours
- AMD Releases Interlagos Opterons With 16 Cores
- Futuremark Working on 3DMark for Windows 8
- Deals Nov 14: Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard $39
- Boutique Sandy Bridge-E PCs Priced From $6K to $13K
- Rapid Fire: Firefox 9 Beta is Already Out for Download
- Intel, MasterCard Confirms Tap-To-Pay Tech for Ultrabooks
- Google Develops Hardware Accelerated Chrome UI
- The Top 5 Supercomputers More Power Hungry Than Ever
"3 Ways That Windows 8 Smarter With Power"
Windows 8 like power. But fire bad - FIRE BAD!!!
Me Tarzan, you Marcus.
So, basically, this is one of those "nothing we weren't already doing" features, but completely re-written to ensure that it's completely broken until Windows 8 SP1 drops?
A cool idea for power management would be a proximity sensor in a laptop that can tell if you are sat with in X amount of feet, hopefully user defined, so if you get up to take a whizz, grab a brewsky from the fridge or answer the door to the pizza dude, the screen turns off automatically, then back on when you return.
It's not just corporations that worry about the power costs, a high-end user can waste enough electricity in a year to buy a new 2Tb hard drive, the way I see it good power management is another way of saying upgrades afforded sooner.
good news to idling system. i use to run my pc almost 24/7 and currently using ws08 r2 and power management is quite well. with this kind of news, for the next windows server (2012 maybe) if this news were right, it will consume less juice too.
I think the biggest power user is the Monitor and the type of computer. I think more businesses will begging to rethink bigger monitors unless they can create a better way of reducing consumption. One way I thought of was to have a sensor to monitor if someone is sitting near the monitor. I think someone else hear mention it too. That's a great ideal to put monitor to sleep only when nobody is using it. I think lower powered more precise engineered PC's will be helpful too. Such as not over powered PC's and graphics. I think the OS can only do what the hardware allows.
there's a smarter way. it's called: linux.
Never speak again. You've lost internet privileges.
___-_-_-__ : I can agree that Linux does many, many things better than Windows, but power management is not one of them on many systems, whereas the systems that run Linux well only tie Windows for power management.
In all fairness though, it's not their fault, as they had to reverse engineer a lot of the ACPI standards, as well as the ACPI quirks for individual motherboards. There are some famous emails subpoenaed from Bill Gates himself during the 90s in regards to using ACPI as a tool to sabotage and obstruct Linux's hardware support.
That would be a cool use MS could make of kinect, have kinect turn on the camera when trigged by a sound like voices or a door opening, then have the monitor turn on and Windows boot from standby if the camera sees someone.
Monitors consume a negligible amount of energy. Yes, you can get lower your energy consumption a little, but implementing what you guys have suggest may, at best, save someone a dollar a year on their bill. The processor using a ton of energy, followed by RAM, the GPU (the GPU can be first on this list), and then the HDDs. If you really want to save money, get energy efficient RAM, a low end GPU, and a ultra-efficient processor.
Would you really want your rig to boot up when you're not at home or in your office cabin, maybe the cat walked in and saw all the fishes on the login screen, by the time you get home.... the cat would already be in the hospital..... or your boss, being the hard hearted Sarah Palin that she is, walks into your cabin and see's the login screen from Who's Nailin Palin....
That would be a really good idea to adjust the brightness and other stuff in the monitor using the detectors and sensors, but not booting up......
How about just making Windows 8 use minimal system resources the way an OS should. All I know is that when I replaced Win 7 Training Bra Edition on my netbook with Peppermint OS One, battery life nearly doubled. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my hard drive was not constantly churning the swap file.
I cant help but feeling up-to-the-minute coverage of windows 8 feels more like advertisement than news.
Sorry to disagree with your review.
On my win8, idling is way too heavy than regular working. Idling pushes CPU in turbo mode.
Couple of processes go into infinite loop.
I cant help but feeling up-to-the-minute coverage of windows 8 feels more like advertisement than news.
it does? hmmmm. I wonder what up-to-the-minute coverage of iEverything feels like...
We are talking a major OS change that's being brought up to our attention, not some toy-gizmo-phone.
How about just making Windows 8 use minimal system resources the way an OS should. All I know is that when I replaced Win 7 Training Bra Edition on my netbook with Peppermint OS One, battery life nearly doubled. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my hard drive was not constantly churning the swap file.
I have a hard time believing you here. I recommend doing a google search on "linux finally fixes power management issue" and see that only within about the last week or two did a fix to a famous power management issue in linux get fixed, and it probably hasn't made its way to distros yet. You see many people talk about the astounding 1 hour battery life they were getting on portables. You also see that it was fixed by mimicing windows.
Then again, now as I'm thinking about it, I do seem to recall it was only on fairly obscure platforms running intel core series chips and intel chipsets, so maybe it didn't affect many people
it does? hmmmm. I wonder what up-to-the-minute coverage of iEverything feels like...We are talking a major OS change that's being brought up to our attention, not some toy-gizmo-phone.
wtf I im using windows 7
Windows 8 is really rocking especially on Power managements and other extra features newly added.
I wonder if windows 8 still has superfetch and Readyboost and if it has been modified from the way win7 works?
Sorry to disagree with your review.On my win8, idling is way too heavy than regular working. Idling pushes CPU in turbo mode. Couple of processes go into infinite loop.
well, it ain't the final version yet.
But is it smarter than a 5th grader?
well, it ain't the final version yet.
That, and whatever software is running might not be compliant with the Win8 model - or has a bug itself when Win8 signals it to prepare for hibernation (or whatever term then used - I forget)
How about just making Windows 8 use minimal system resources the way an OS should. All I know is that when I replaced Win 7 Training Bra Edition on my netbook with Peppermint OS One, battery life nearly doubled. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my hard drive was not constantly churning the swap file.
Or you can just add more ram and do away with the swap...
I love to use Linux more than windows, but I will admit that windows has Linux beat in power management
Monitors consume a negligible amount of energy. Yes, you can get lower your energy consumption a little, but implementing what you guys have suggest may, at best, save someone a dollar a year on their bill. The processor using a ton of energy, followed by RAM, the GPU (the GPU can be first on this list), and then the HDDs. If you really want to save money, get energy efficient RAM, a low end GPU, and a ultra-efficient processor.
Agreed, but tie it all together, you step away from your screen and it turns the screen off, then it also goes directly to hibernate, cutting all the CPU / GPU and HDD activity to zero-ish.
Would you really want your rig to boot up when you're not at home or in your office cabin, maybe the cat walked in and saw all the fishes on the login screen, by the time you get home.... the cat would already be in the hospital
Well my fault I just said a proximity sensor but as some bright spark earlier said you could use a Kinect sensor, which would know the difference between a person and a cat
In fact when the Kinect SDK hits the world full steam for Windows 8 I think things like this will be all over the place.
As usual the swarm of Linux fanboys show up.