"Seth Hieronymus" <sethh@principia.edu> writes:
> Do processors use more power / produce more heat when they are doing
> processing other than an idle loop?
Current-day processors use an extra bit of power every time the state of
one of the millions of gizmos (groups of a few transistors) on the chip
changes. There are a few parts of the chip that are always changing at
a fixed rate (ie, the clock parts) but other parts (floating point and
integer sub-processors, registers, etc) have gizmo-state-changing
happening a lot or a little, depending on what is being computed, and
most (?) processors can be configured to shut down most sections of the
chip into a kind of "hold" state during idle, or not.
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