a resource made available to the processing element or a combination thereof as one example an operating point of a processing element is changed by modifying resources such as clocks frequency voltage or power to alter the rate of a processing element these different power and frequency states are often referred to as p states or t states which are illustrative examples of operating points in addition other rate mechanisms such as the rate of instruction issue and memory access issue may be altered for different operating points as an additional example an operating point of a processing element is changed by modifying allocation of shared resources such as memory memory bandwidth caches fetch hardware decode hardware out of order hardware reservation hardware and any other logic hardware utilized by the processing element therefore an operating point of a processing element includes any combination of a rate of the processing element and allocation of shared resources available to the processing element in other words an operating point may include allocation performance of a shared resource such as a cache as well as a rate level such as a voltage and frequency of a processing element to illustrate assume a first operating point of processing element 130 includes full power voltage full clock frequency access to all the ways of a shared cache.