Moblin Zone

Moblin Zone: "Tool-based optimization. This means taking advantage of tools that can help mobile developers create more power-efficient applications, including:

PowerTOP is a Linux tool that helps you find programs that are misbehaving while the computer is idle.

Battery Life Toolkit is a Linux framework to measure battery life on a MID.

Application Energy Toolkit helps you simulate power status, graph power consumption, and measure total power consumption.

Using those techniques, your applications can make intelligent choices about when to aggressively switch devices to sleep modes, take advantage of hardware-accelerated codecs, reduce application demand for wakeups (and improve overall perceived responsiveness), and use the appropriate power policies depending on context.
In the second part of this article, we’ll explore how to optimize mobile applications for maximum performance – critical when multithreading, doing a lot of network IO, engaging in CPU-intensive tasks, or displaying multimedia.
Inside the Intel Atom Processor
When it comes to power management, there are some cool features in the Intel Atom processor (pun intended). The first is the C6 power state, mentioned above. Intel calls that Deep Power Down Technology. To quote Dileep Bhandarkar, an Intel engineer,
We save away the entire processor state for the cores and turn off the caches and put the cores in an extremely low power state. This significantly reduces processor power consumed in idle mode and extends battery life. The OS initiates this with an MWAIT instruction and the CPU works with the chipset VRM to enter the deep power down state. On a wake up event (interrupt), voltage is increased, clocks and CPU state re"