A Day in the Life

A typical workday in the United States encompasses nine hours: eight hours of work, with an hour for lunch. During this time, a PC will be actively used, will sit idle for some periods of time, and will be asleep for other periods.

In order to effectively model this typical behavior, the workloads must be based on real applications and the results of the applications must be meaningful, not just iterative loops or meaningless calculations. During the periods of active use, higher-performing systems will accomplish more work or finish more tasks. During brief periods of inactivity, such as “think time,” answering phone calls or interacting with coworkers, the system drops back to idle. For longer periods of inactivity, such as lunch or overnight, the system is assumed to be configured to drop into Standby (S3 ACPI state, suspend to memory) after 30 minutes of idle.

Intel is currently working with SYSmark* 2007 Preview, a performance benchmark suite designed and published by BAPCo*, a consortium of industry-leading companies with a common interest in consistent performance measurement. SYSmark* 2007 comprises office productivity, e-learning, 3D modeling and video content creation tasks. The application mix is based on research into emerging usage models and computing trends. It models realistic human-computer interactions, with think-time and human-level typing speeds.

The above chart illustrates that system level power usage can vary dramatically during each application type and that each application has a distinctive “fingerprint.” But the most significant result of the research is that the system is at or near idle a little over 40 percent of the time.

SYSmark* 2007 Preview takes approximately 50 minutes to complete, while the previous version, SYSmark* 2004SE took roughly 90 minutes. The shorter completion time affords greater flexibility in assigning the number of work sessions per day. The first iteration, EEP 1.0, broke the workday down into four two-hour work sessions, with the leftover time after the completion of the SYSmark* 2004 SE tasks defined as breaks:

EEP 1.0: The first EEP model had four SYSmark* 2004 SE runs in as many work periods.

The 90-minute run time allowed only four work sessions per day and one run per session. The 50-minute run time of SYSmark* 2007 permits two runs per work session—or just a single run—so that the overall number of tasks performed and amount of idle time can be tuned to more accurately reflect actual human workdays. Here is an example of four work sessions with six runs:

EEP 2.0: This new model achieves a better balance of work time, idle and sleep, while retaining essentially the same number of user tasks per day as EEP 1.0.