Intel® Power Gadget

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Development Team

Windows: Seung Woo Kim, Karthik Krishnan, Jun De Vega
Mac: Patrick Konsor
Linux: Martin Dimitrov, Carl Strickland

Introduction

Intel® Power Gadget is a software-based power estimation tool enabled for 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processors or later. It is supported on Windows* and Mac OS X* and includes a application, driver, and libraries to monitor and estimate real-time processor package power information in watts using the energy counters in the processor. With this release, we are providing functionality to evaluate power information on various platforms including notebooks, desktops and servers.

Background

Traditional methods to estimate power/energy usage of the processor has always been a cumbersome task that included special purpose tools or instrumentation on the platform along with third party equipment. The motivation for the tool was to assist end-users, ISV’s, OEM’s, developers, and others interested in a more precise estimation of power from a software level without any H/W instrumentation.

New Features

With the current release, we are providing additional functionalities that include estimation of power on multi-socket systems as well as externally callable APIs to extract power information within sections of code. The multi-socket support essentially evaluates the Energy MSR on a per-socket basis and provides an estimate of power draw per socket. The API layer is a set of libraries and dlls that can be called and offers the flexibility to build the tool within code sections of an application. Latest release also includes support for Windows 8* (desktop mode).

Brief Description (Windows version)

Intel® Power Gadget 2.6 consists of the following components. Set of driver and libraries which access and post process the processor energy counter to calculate the power usage in watts and processor frequency (default install directory will be ~\Program Files\Intel\Power Gadget 2.6 for 64-bit OS)

System Requirements (Windows version)

Windows 7* 32-bit and 64-bit
Windows 8* desktop mode 32-bit and 64-bit
Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 RC2* (64-bit server platforms)
Microsoft* .Net Framework 4
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable package (x86 or x64 depends on OS)
2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processor or later, older processors not supported

Single socket

Multi-socket

System Requirements (Mac OS X version)

Mac OS X 10.6 or later
2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor or later,

Installation / Setup (Windows version)

Download the appropriate 32 or 64-bit package and copy to your test system

Run setup.exe as an administrator. Accept the UAC, if one appears
.Follow the installer prompt instructions to complete installation

Microsoft* .Net Framework 4 (will automatically be downloaded from Microsoft* site if not yet installed in your system) needs Internet connection
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (will automatically get installed if not yet installed)

Usages (Windows version)

Common use of Intel® Power Gadget is to monitor energy usage of the processor

Provides processor power (Watts) and frequency (MHz) in real-time via graph displayed in the GUI
Lets you log the power and frequency measurements and save it in a csv format.

Steps

Double click on the desktop shortcut and the GUI will launch.

Drag “Intel” logo to move the GUI.
Right click on the chart area will show a pop-up menu to choose options or close the application. Options have the following parameters.Click “Start Log” button in the GUI to start logging. Press the same button “Stop Log” to stop logging. While it’s logging, red label “REC” will blink in the power chart area.
- You can choose to add time-stamp to the log file name or not.
- You can choose the log file name.
- Screen Update Resolution lets you choose how often the GUI is updated – default 1 seconds and it’s not recommended to change the value.
- Log Sampling Resolution lets you change the logging sampling resolution ranging from 50 ms to 1 sec.
- In a multi-socket system, you can choose which package information to display in the GUI. The log will record all package information in a csv file.
Click "Start Log" button in the GUI to start logging. Press the same button "Stop Log" to stop logging. While it's logging, red label "REC" will blink in the powe chart area
Using Intel® Power Gadget 2.6 in a script;
- In order to start and stop the logging in a script, first launch the GUI as usual.
- At the beginning of the script, call “IntelPowerGadget.exe -start” and it will trigger the logging in the GUI.
- At the end of the script, call “IntelPowerGadget.exe -stop” and it will stop the logging.
- The parameters for the log are based on the options set in the GUI.
PowerLog.exe is the command line version of Intel® Power Gadget in logging power usage

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Known Limitations/Issues

Only works on 2nd Generation Intel® CoreTM processor family or newer
Use only 32-bit installer for 32-bit OS and 64-bit installer for 64-bit OS
Application may hang after running for a long period of time (just close and restart application)

API

Intel® Power Gadget also povides a C Application Programming Interface (API) for accessing this power and frequency data in your program; the API is supported on Windows and Mac OS X. For more information on the API's, see Using the Intel(R) Power Gadget API on Mac OS X.

Download

Intel® Power Gadget 2.6 (Windows 32-bit)

Intel® Power Gadget 2.6 (Windows 64-bit)

Intel® Power Gadget for Mac

Intel® Power Gadget 2.2 for Linux

End User License Agreement included in download