On 3/28/2016 11:20 PM, haoyu Wang wrote:
> hi,powertop's  developers .I am a student which recently studing  power consumption of pc.I have known windows power monitor software
> Joulemeter. there are some papers introduce how it works . but i can't find the same documents that introduce the powertop.
>
> so  i want to know the  process of calculating the  watts of those components .for example, how to calculate  the cpu's power ? i  have following  questions :
> 1. does powertop  use power model to calculate the  power ?
> 2. does powertop use the utilization of cpu and combine some cpu's  power model to calculate power ?
> 3.how to get  those utilization ?use linux kernal function  or directly read some data from cpu  registers which likes  intel power gadget ?

powertop builds a dynamic model of your system and tries to estimate the contribution to total system power based on that model and the current utilizations of each of the 
components in the model, and tries to, over time, train that model based on more and more measurements that are taken (usually by the battery, but we also support some
external power meters)