HP Power Regulator for ProLiant servers

Introduction

Enterprise servers can place large demands on facility power and cooling resources. In some cases,

facility power and cooling constraints can delay IT purchases. HP Power Regulator gives you a tool to

increase server efficiency and free up cooling and power resources. This lets you use power/cooling

resources where you need them the most. It lets you manage processor power consumption and

system performance to meet your business needs.

Processor P-states

Server processors from Intel and AMD have performance state registers that can switch a processor

between different performance states (P-states). Through HP Power Regulator technology, HP firmware

or the OS can access and change the P-states.

Changing the performance state (the processor frequency and voltage) directs processors to operate

at different power levels. This gives you some control over total system power consumption. Tables 1

and 2 show examples of P-states for Intel® Xeon® and AMD™ Opteron™ processors.

Table 1.

P-states of the Quad-core Intel Xeon 5670 2.93-GHz processor

P-state Description Core Frequency

Pmax Maximum performance 2.93 GHz

Pmin Minimum power 1.6 GHz

Table 2. P-states of the AMD Opteron 6174 2.2-GHz processor

P-state Description Core Frequency

Pmax Maximum performance 2.2 GHz

Pmin Minimum power 800 MHz

Power Regulator technology

HP Power Regulator is an OS-independent power management feature of HP ProLiant servers. It is

included on all HP ProLiant servers (200-series and above).

Processor power and performance state registers exposed by processor vendors let you use Power

Regulator to control processor power usage and performance. Power Regulator directly adjusts the

frequency and core voltage of ProLiant server processors.

Using Power Regulator, you can configure a server to maximize performance, maximize power

savings, or match processor power consumption dynamically as system load changes. This lets you

maintain an optimal balance of performance and power utilization under all operating conditions.

HP Power Regulator modes

You can configure Power Regulator for any of four operating modes:

• HP Static High Performance mode