Patent ID: 8010822

Claim:
A method for balancing performance and power savings of a computing device having multiple cores, comprising: determining which cores of the multiple cores are actively processing work; determining a power policy to initiate a performance and power savings plan for the multiple cores, wherein determining the power policy comprises: creating a core parking mask utilizing a bit value to represent a parked or unparked status of a core; determining thread processor affinity masks representing one or more cores on which a thread is assigned to be processed; providing at least a portion of the performance and power savings plan for the cores by combining an inversion of the core parking mask and the thread processor affinity masks using an “AND” operator to create an available processor set; and calculating which cores are designated as parked or unparked based at least in part on the available processor set; and parking at least one of the cores actively processing work based at least in part on the power policy indicating that the one of the cores actively processing work is designated as a parked core.