Nov 15, 2010 Posted by BoxCycle on Nov 15, 2010 in Cool Ideas, Environment | Comments Off on Reduce Your Computer Energy Use Automatically

Reduce Your Computer Energy Use Automatically

A new software program claims to reduce the energy your computer uses automatically.  It is aptly named Granola.  The program is free and doesn’t interfere with your computer use.

My understanding is that the software works primarily by taking advantage of the ability of modern computers to vary the speed of the CPU in real-time.  Most of the time there is no benefit in your CPU running at maximum speed (your computer is probably idle or doing low CPU demand tasks like word processing).  Granola tries to give you exactly the amount of computer power you need for the current task, saving energy in the process.

It is a bit surprising that modern OSes do not fully take advantage of this already to cut power use.  Perhaps it hasn’t been a priority for them, or perhaps Granola adds additional secret sauce to provide power savings above those OS provides.

A neat way to verify their claims would be to use a power meter like Kill-A-Watt.

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