Patent ID: 7475262

Claim:
A method comprising: determining a processor performance characteristic associated with a first workload by reading at least one of an operating system counter, a processor counter, a chipset counter, or a device-level counter, and wherein the at least one of an operating system counter, a processor counter, a chipset counter, or a device-level counter is associated with efficiency of a processor with respect to a workload; determining a processor performance state for the first workload based on the performance characteristic, wherein determining the processor performance characteristic comprises: instructing a processor to execute the first workload at the first processor performance state; instructing the processor to execute the first workload at a second processor performance state, the second processor performance state associated with a higher power consumption than the first processor performance state; determining a second processor performance characteristic associated with the first workload executed at the second processor performance state; determining a performance degradation based on the first processor performance characteristic and the second processor performance characteristic; and associating a third processor performance state with the first workload if the performance degradation is greater than a threshold value, wherein the third processor performance state is different from the first processor performance state.