In Dave Sherohman's email, 13-07-2001: > On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 12:13:20PM +0100, J.A.Serralheiro wrote: > > On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Alexey wrote: > > > You know, while running DOS or Windows, the CPU is hot (I can touch it), > > > even if I do nothing. It becomes cool under Linux!!! > > > > strange, never heard of that. > > Linux (and NT, incidentally) sends HLT (HaLT) instructions to the CPU > telling it to shut itself down (until the next interrupt) when there's > nothing for it to do. So if your linux system tells you you're at > 30% CPU utilization, the CPU is essentially turned off 70% of the > time. > > DOS, Win3.x, and Win9x aren't that smart. They don't use HLT - I > suspect they send NOP (No OPeration) as an idle, but I'm not certain. > Instead of turning off the processor when there's nothing for it to > do, they have it twiddle its thumbs. Even at 1% CPU utilization, > these OSes keep it running 100% of the time. > > I would guess, based on their respective legacy codebases, that Win2k > uses HLT and ME/XP don't, but I haven't heard anything definite about > them to date. Not that this isn't off-topic or anything - but as a owner of a processor that gets hot often (Athlon 1.2Ghz), I can confirm that like linux, XP, win2k and NT all sent HLT. DOS, Win9x, and ME send NOP or something similar. Of course this is all going off of my lovely sensors package on my motherboard telling me they're cooler after I wake up in the morn.. -- Michael Janssen - Jamuraa - janssen@cns.uni.edu - jamuraa@base0.net GPG Fingerprint: 87F1 92C4 44AA 4105 B1C4 EDEC D995 9620 C00E 9159
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