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Idle is a state that a computer processor is in when it is not being used by any program. Every program or task that runs on a computer system occupies a certain amount of processing time on the CPU. If the CPU has completed all tasks it is idle. Modern processors use idle time to save power.
In Windows NT operating systems, the System Idle Process contains one or more kernel threads which run when no other runnable thread can be scheduled on a CPU. In a multiprocessor system, there is one idle thread associated with each CPU core. For a system with hyperthreading enabled, there is an idle thread for each logical processor.
The Singularity Is Near – book by Raymond Kurzweil dealing with the progression and projections of development of computer capabilities, including beyond human levels of performance; TOP500 – list of the 500 most powerful (non-distributed) computer systems in the world
typical thermal power, which is measured under normal load (for instance, AMD's average CPU power) maximum thermal power, which is measured under a worst-case load; For example, the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz has a 68.4 W typical thermal power and 85 W maximum thermal power. When the CPU is idle, it will draw far less than the typical thermal power.
For example, hardware timers send interrupts to the CPU at regular intervals. Most operating systems execute a HLT instruction when there is no immediate work to be done, putting the processor into an idle state. In Windows NT, for example, this instruction is run in the "System Idle Process". On x86 processors, the opcode of HLT is 0xF4.
The final result comes from dividing the number of instructions by the number of CPU clock cycles. The number of instructions per second and floating point operations per second for a processor can be derived by multiplying the number of instructions per cycle with the clock rate (cycles per second given in Hertz) of the processor in question ...
The dynamic power (switching power) dissipated by a chip is C·V 2 ·A·f, where C is the capacitance being switched per clock cycle, V is voltage, A is the Activity Factor [1] indicating the average number of switching events per clock cycle by the transistors in the chip (as a unitless quantity) and f is the clock frequency.
In multiprocessor computer systems, software lockout is the issue of performance degradation due to the idle wait times spent by the CPUs in kernel-level critical sections. Software lockout is the major cause of scalability degradation in a multiprocessor system, posing a limit on the maximum useful number of processors.