Nonideal battery and main memory effects on CPU speed-setting for low power

This paper explores the system-level power-performance tradeoffs of dynamically varying CPU speed. Previous work in CPU speed-setting considered only the power of the CPU and only CPUs that vary supply voltage with frequency. This work takes a broader approach, considering total system power, battery capacity, and main memory bandwidth. The results, which are up to a factor of four less than ideal, show that all three must be considered when setting the CPU speed.