IBM, MontaVista propose Linux "Dynamic Power Management" standard

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Jan. 14, 2003

IBM's Austin Research Lab and MontaVista Software report that a combination of technologies can significantly extend battery life in consumer electronic products. The key, they say, is an improved power saving technique called Dynamic Power Management.

The companies claim that pairing the IBM PowerPC 405LP embedded processor with a version of MontaVista's embedded Linux distribution which implements Dynamic Power Management may reduce processor power consumption as much as 50 percent -- translating into an estimated 20-percent overall power savings in products like smartphones and PDAs -- resulting in extended battery life and reduced device size and cost.

The two companies have coauthored a whitepaper, Dynamic Power Management for Embedded Systems (free PDF download), which describes the technology and suggests standardizing on a Dynamic Power Management and policy framework that can support differing power management strategies, either under control of operating system components or user-level policy managers. Comments from interested parties are invited.

According to the whitepaper, power management has traditionally focused on the reduction of power consumption in computer systems by placing them into static modes such as sleep and suspend when not in use. Dynamic Power Management techniques, on the other hand, are designed to save power automatically -- even while the system is in normal use -- without requiring any action on the part of the user. For example, in the small amount of time between frames of an MPEG4 video clip, voltage can be ramped down and back up in time to handle the next frame, saving energy between each and every frame of the video.

While dynamic power management has been the topic of research for many years, only recently have processors become available that could take full advantage of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, for example IBM's PowerPC 405LP.

Limited samples of the IBM PowerPC 405LP are said to be available now from IBM, and volume production will be available in the third quarter of 2003. MontaVista Linux CEE, which contains an implementation of Dynamic Power Management, is expected to be released during the first half of 2003.

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