Patent ID: 7346787

Claim:
A method comprising: initializing a performance profiler of a processing system, the performance profiler to comprise performance profile parameters for a power management policy for the processing system; determining that performance details for the processing system should be collected; in response to determining that performance details should be collected, retrieving performance metrics for the processing system from a performance monitoring unit (PMU) of the processing system; determining a current performance state of the processing system, based at least in part on the performance profile parameters and the performance metrics from the PMU, wherein the operation of determining a current performance state of the processing system comprises generating performance data that identifies a state of the processing system from the group consisting of: an idle state; a memory bound state; a processor bound state; and a memory bound and processor bound state; and communicating the current performance state to a policy manager of the processing system, the communicated performance state to comprise the performance data that identifies the state of the processing system.