Patent ID: 7657766

Claim:
A processor comprising: a plurality of instruction schedulers to be selectively activated based, at least in part, on energy efficiency associated with the plurality of instruction schedulers; logic to determine the energy efficiency by computing an energy performance metric for each of the plurality of instruction schedulers as a product of an access count and an energy amount used per access over a period of time, the energy performance metric including an energy delay 2 product metric; and resizing circuit to compare the computed energy performance metric with a previously computed energy performance metric associated with each of the plurality of instruction schedulers to determined one or more of the plurality of instruction schedulers that are to be activated, and activate the one or more of the plurality of instruction schedulers based on the comparison, wherein the comparison comprises identifying a decrease in energy efficiency if the computed energy performance metric is less than the previously computed energy performance metric, and identifying an increase in energy efficiency if the computed energy performance metric is greater than the previously computed energy performance metric.