Intel Releases PowerTOP 2.6 To Improve Linux Battery Life

Intel has released a new version of their open-source PowerTOP utility for Linux systems to diagnose power consumption issues and make improvements to power management by individually analyzing the system's current power settings.

PowerTOP remains one of Intel's long-standing open-source utilities for trying to improve the power efficiency of Linux systems, particularly around laptops/ultrabooks and other Intel x86 portable systems. With the PowerTOP 2.6 release that happened a few days ago there's a new look-and-feel to the auto-generated HTML reports, support for compiling the PowerTOP code-base as C++11, and there's several bug-fixes to the utility itself.

More information on the PowerTOP 2.6 release can be found via Intel's 01.org project site.

It's already been three years since my last benchmarking the affects of PowerTOP so today I'll be running some fresh tests on an Intel ultrabook with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and PowerTOP 2.6 to see the impact of following the Intel program's power recommendations -- the results will be out on Phoronix in the days ahead. For those benchmarking their laptops/ultrabooks with the Phoronix Test Suite it's just a matter of setting the MONITOR=sys.power and/or PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 to automatically log the power consumption of battery-backed systems on Linux and to optionally calculate the performance-per-Watt of any contained PTS/OpenBenchmarking.org tests.