Intel® vPro™ Technology

Power Efficiency and Sustainable Information Technology

Future Enterprise Integration and Client Power Management in IT Organizations

Enabling a comprehensive environment for client PC energy consumption takes a combination of forces: understanding the environment, monitoring energy consumption, and managing towards a common goal. As the capabilities of Intel® vPro™ technology evolve, IT professionals will have a complete set of tools to reach that goal.

ISV Console Within the Enterprise
In order to achieve the results we have described, any additional features of Intel vPro technology that provide client power monitoring and control need to be fully integrated into the ISV consoles. Utilizing that information enables IT personnel to get the maximum value out of their resources and to minimally impact the company’s users. Monitoring the performance and activity profile of client PCs enables optimal energy efficiency in the enterprise. We advocate the flexibility to run monitoring and control software as an agent, or as firmware native to the platform, to enable flexible deployment, management, and policy definition. Moving forward we see two major areas of interest to the industry for power management:

1. Monitor alternating current (AC) power used by the client to accurately measure energy consumption and to provide an auditable energy-savings trail.
2. Control the client power states to save money, be environmentally conscious, and reduce the carbon footprint of the industry as a whole.

Estimating Power Consumption: Methodology and Practice
Existing estimation technology is limited to software that estimates power, based on time and system states, and then looks up the power profile of the system logged. There are inherent inaccuracies in this methodology due to the inability of the software to be able to accurately model the users’ real behavior: the software measures keyboard or mouse inputs, and the system state to estimate the time the system spent in various power states. Once these measurements are taken, the time and state information is translated into power by performing a calculation on a database of “known” or characterized devices. A worst-case scenario is when IT professionals “characterize” systems and manually input and maintain the data. This method is not only expensive, but it is time-consuming and highly susceptible to obsolescence.

Key drivers for improvements in power management are the accuracy of information collected and the additional hardware costs associated with the collection of that information. Intel is investigating adding centralized sensors to the client PC that are standards-based and have minimal impact on cost.

Desktop PCs, enabled with Intel vPro technology, that utilize the embedded Intel Manageability Engine (Intel ME) can potentially run firmware that can provide a standard Application Programming Interface (API) to provide information, through standard network management protocols, to agents that run in the Capability Operating System (COS) [7]. This firmware would collect data from sensors on the desktop PC and would accurately monitor power usage, taking into account basic faults, such as a fan or temperature sensor failure: the findings would be relayed back to the console agent (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Platform and system overview
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The firmware would be flexible enough to enable the end user, via the console, to determine the time between samples and also the time intervals in which data are sent back to the console.

By using software that can access the CPU and the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) registers, the firmware would be able to provide those data to the application software or the console (depending upon which implementation is used, that is, native or agent). By using Intel vPro technology with the embedded security provided by the Intel ME, a platform enabled with this technology, can provide a “tamper resistant” audit path. Also, by using these technology OOB capabilities, any information stored in the Intel ME can be retrieved after hours: the console can wake the client PC, download the information back to the console and then shut down the client PC to its original sleep state.

For client PCs, utilizing existing sensors and standardizing around those make economical sense and expedite industry adoption.

By using Intel vPro technology through the Intel ME that resides in the PCH, it will be possible to monitor and control the platform by using standards-based management console software.

Future Power Management Configuration Settings and Policies
Having accurate and auditable information enables IT managers to gather statistics and characterize the energy used in the enterprise.

Policies can be applied to control the time of day to shut down or power on computers. This is a major power-savings action for a corporation that, as discussed previously, can be accomplished successfully with Intel vPro technology. Other methods can also allow control parameters such as when to power down the hard drive, turn off the display, or suspend the platform. However, such settings do not allow for fine-grain power management of platform components that have to be kept on when the platform is in the ACPI S0 state. It has been determined that even though client PCs in an S0 state are in an idle state for 80 to 90 percent of the time, several platform components are kept in high-power states to meet the service latency requirements of devices and applications in the platform [8].

If the devices and applications could dynamically convey their service latency requirements to the platform based on workload (low latency tolerance when active and high latency tolerance when idle), that could dramatically reduce the energy consumption of the platforms when in an idle state. Such information would allow for future policies that would integrate the local requirements with the remote policy settings to enable substantial power savings without sacrificing performance and reliability.

Enforcing software policy controls locally in each client PC, will lead to significant gains in energy reduction. However, Intel also recognizes systemic issues in existing platforms that cannot be addressed by software: the software cannot service the request to save power fast enough, and moreover, it is not cognizant enough of the entire system state to ensure stable operation. When an operating system or agent issues low-power state commands, they are not instantaneous. Commands take time to traverse the driver stack, and real-time hybrid operation is not possible, due to added system latencies.

A platform is comprised of core logic components, a CPU and PCH, and the devices that connect to these, such as the Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices. These USB devices can be a keyboard or mouse for basic Input/Output (I/O). Other examples of devices are wireless or wired Network Interface Cards (NICs), and discrete graphics cards. Each one of these devices is typically routed through the PCH or CPU (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Device latency and power-management concept
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Having power control and subsystem logic embedded in the hardware of the platform means the devices can generate power-management messages when they transition from high-power states to low-power states. The platform will act on these messages without having to generate an interrupt that would unnecessarily cause the CPU to use high power to process these messages. In this new method of platform power control, the operating system can provide the guidance and constraints that allow the hardware to make policy decisions to a granularity and latency unattainable by software.

The Role of Energy Efficiency Standards
It is important to continue to drive for adoption of ACPI and other standards and services that expose energy-efficiency capabilities across the client PC. It is also important to provide common methods to connect energy efficiency to other enterprise tasks, such as security and manageability. We have seen a promising evolution of the ACPI standards over the past few years along with the uptake of these standards across multiple OEMs and operating system vendors. Most IT organizations do not consider the notion of integrating power management into their enterprise applications, but the infrastructure to do this has been around for almost a decade with robust capabilities available that can be utilized where possible.

To continue to grow in today’s world of diminishing energy resources and higher costs, all computing sectors of the PC industry should work together to reach a goal in which desktop and notebook PCs in an enterprise can use a combination of hardware, firmware, BIOS, and operating system and application configuration elements and policies to maximize the energy efficiency of enterprise client PCs, independent of their location. This concept can then extend beyond the PC and extend to office equipment and additional form-factors over time. For now, however, this is a call for action in the area of enterprise business systems.

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