1. Field
The present disclosure relates to methods of managing power and electronic devices, and more particularly, to a method of managing power and electronic device based on operation information related to an operation recognizable to a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of electronic device-related technology, one device is able to perform a variety of functions, and such a device includes various pieces of hardware for supporting the variety of functions. As the various pieces of hardware are included in the device, the importance of power management of each piece of hardware is increasing.
Hardware power management is performed via various methods, for example, by enabling or disabling certain hardware modules, increasing or decreasing performance of various hardware modules, and changing a hardware operating property, such as a frequency or a voltage. As described above, because various pieces of hardware included in the device involve complex operations, it may be difficult to achieve sufficient reduction in power consumption merely by performing power management on one piece of hardware. Accordingly, a method of managing power may be modified according to usage scenarios of different pieces of hardware. A specific example of such a method of managing power includes advanced power management (APM) developed by Intel and Microsoft and supported and used by Linux kernels.
Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is one of a number of methods for performing power management. DVFS may control a voltage and/or a frequency of hardware to increase or decrease according to settings. Generally, when performance needs to be increased, such as when a processing load increases, the voltage and/or the frequency of the hardware may be raised. On the other hand, when power consumption needs to be decreased, the voltage and/or the frequency of the hardware may be lowered. DVFS may be particularly useful in battery-powered devices, such as laptops, tablets, or mobile phones, to conserve power.
However, there are limitations to DVFS according to general principles of electronic technology. In general, an increase in frequency creates an increase in power and an increase in performance of hardware. However, while a performance increase and frequency and/or voltage increases are linear, an increase in power is a squaring function. Accordingly, performance and power consumption of the hardware may become out of balance under certain circumstances.
In addition, since DVFS, according to general principles of electronics, operates based on a hardware device, it is difficult to control a frequency and/or a voltage based on an application domain or an application output.
Accordingly, a conventional method of managing power may attempt to make contradictory decisions under certain circumstances or may lead to fluctuations undesirable in the hardware's performance or power consumption, thus leading to the hardware becoming overheated or having low performance.