A Day in the Life…

A typical working day in the United States is nine hours: eight hours of working time with an hour for lunch. Workday length varies by country, and can be adjusted to “localize” this approach. Breaking the work-time into four two-hour blocks, the workday looks like this:

The numbers of hours in a workday will vary somewhat by country, and the model can be adjusted to factor in these variations.

During each of the work sessions, a given amount of work gets done, where faster systems will complete the run more quickly. In this proposed methodology, any remaining time in the two-hour window, the system is considered inactive. The methodology assumes that Power Options for an inactive state are configured to put the system to Standby (S3 ACPI state, suspend to memory) after 15 minutes of idle.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a diagram of the overall usage model: The inactive time remaining at the end of each two-hour window is denoted as a break.

This approach assumes that a system can complete a SYSmark* run in under two hours, something nearly all current-generations can do.

During the lunch hour, the system is assumed to be asleep during that entire hour.

At the end of the workday, the system is then put to Standby until 8:00 the next morning. In the business environment, a capability such as Intel’s Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) can enable the system to go into a low-power, Standby, while ensuring that the system is manageable if the IT department needed to perform any type of inventorying or critical patch updates. In addition to maintaining a manageable platform, placing the PC into a low-power managed sleep state can cut annual energy costs by over half.

Ultimately, this methodology will output a performance score, as well as daily and yearly energy cost for that level of performance.