Electronic – How to compute CPU power consumption

cpupower

I am working on a problem for which I need to know how much power will be consumed on a given CPU as the parameter sizes are increased. The following properties/attributes of the CPU are available:

    Version: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 0 @ 2.60GHz
    Voltage: 0.8 V
    External Clock: 100 MHz
    Max Speed: 2600 MHz

It is not possible to install any special tool as far as I know from the admins of the system. I am looking for a suggestion for some kind of formula/method to map a given executable running on this CPU and the power that the CPU will consume. Do I need to know any more about the CPU to obtain a more accurate power profile? About the executable: is there a way to accurately figure out its CPU profile?

Best Answer

If you're mapping a given executable and you have access to more information about the CPU then you may be able to use some equations from frequency scaling to get a power profile.

For instance, the power consumption of a processor is estimated by:

$$ P = C * V^2 * F $$

where P is power, C is the capacitance being switched per clock cycle, V is voltage, and F is the processor frequency (cycles per second).