PowerTop, a power consumption management benchmarking tool

Intel has created a really nice tool which makes it possible to determine power leaks caused by the interrupts of particular programs. In these way you can see the specific executables causing power consuming wakeups. Also some statistics about CPU power states, the average power consumption resp. usage in watts and the remaining battery life time are shown. In this way you can use this tool to benchmark your applications concerning power consumption which is today more and more important as there are a lot of mobile devices using these applications. There are many computing performance benchmarks but almost no power consumption benchmark results. With Intels new tool powertop this will hopefully change soon. Furthermore powertop provides general tips (also inside the application) how to reduce the power consumption of your running Linux operating system. There is also a site which describes the information and output details provided by powertop.

You can install this tool by simply typing

aptitude install powertop

and start it from the command line by typing

powertop