▲ | wongarsu 3 days ago | |
However there are two factors that might make "race to idle" more valid on phones than on most other platforms: Smartphone chips are designed to much stricter thermal and power limits. There is only so much power you can get out of the tiny battery, and only so much heat you can get rid of without making the phone uncomfortably hot. Even in a burst that puts a limit on the wastefulness. Desktop CPUs are very different: If you can get 10% more performance while doubling power draw, people will just buy bigger coolers and bigger power supplies to go along with the CPU. Notebook CPUs are somewhere in the middle: limited, but with much better cooling and much more powerful batteries than phones. The other thing is the operating system: "race to idle" makes sense in phones because the OS will actually put the CPU into sleep states if there's nothing to do, and puts active effort into not waking the CPU up unnecessarily and cramming work into the time slots when the CPU is active anyways. Desktop operating systems just don't do that to the same degree. You might race to idle, but the rest of the system will then just waste power with background work once it's idle. |