Original 45nm Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture

Power Improvements on 2008 Desktop Platforms

DESKTOP POWER INSTRUMENTED REFERENCE PLATFORM

Many of the power measurements referenced throughout the remainder of this paper were taken on a specially designed and instrumented Intel vPro desktop reference validation platform (RVP). As mentioned earlier, the processor has three power rails, the GMCH has five rails, the ICH has seven rails, and the system memory has three individual power rails. All of these individual voltage rails are instrumented with low-loss, high-accuracy sense resistors and voltage sensing points. All this instrumentation is fed into a high-speed data acquisition card for real-time display and offline analysis. This gives us visibility into the DC power required by each of the major components on the platform along with information on the current state of the platform. The C-state information (refer to (Figure 2)) is also measured by logging the coordination signals used between the processor, GMCH, and ICH to set up entry and exit points from these C-states.

The AC power consumed by the platform is measured by using an AC power meter that connects to the wall power outlet at one end and to the silver box power supply at the other end. The data collection was done with a Windows Vista* SP1 OS using the balanced mode of native OS power-management techniques under various workload conditions (although we focused mostly on idle as our workload).

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