Apple granted a new ‘conserving power’ patent
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 13, 2005 at 2:26am
On Dec. 6, the US Patent & Trademark Office revealed that Apple was granted Patent number 6,973,585 for the patent titled “Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor.” The sole inventor listed on the patent is Lynn R. Youngs, for application number 103911 dated April 2005.
FIG. 1B illustrates alternate power areas within processor 102 in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.
Apple’s summary of the invention
One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates reducing static power consumption of a processor. During operation, the system receives a signal indicating that instruction execution within the processor is to be temporarily halted. In response to this signal, the system halts an instruction-processing portion of the processor, and reduces the voltage supplied to the instruction-processing portion of the processor. Full voltage is maintained to a remaining portion of the processor, so that the remaining portion of the processor can continue to operate while the instruction-processing portion of the processor is in reduced power mode.
Various embodiments
The following are embodiments presented in Apple’s summary. Note: Strictly for the purposes of visual clarity, the verbiage of “In one embodiment of the present invention,” has been replaced by a numeric presentation value not presented in the patent.
Embodiment # 1: reducing the voltage supplied to the instruction-processing portion of the processor involves reducing the voltage to a minimum value that maintains state information within the instruction-processing portion of the processor.
Embodiment # 2: reducing the voltage supplied to the instruction-processing portion of the processor involves reducing the voltage to zero.
Embodiment # 3: the system saves state information from the instruction-processing portion of the processor prior to reducing the voltage supplied to the instruction-processing portion of the processor. This state information can either be saved in the remaining portion of the processor or to the main memory of the computer system.
Embodiment # 4: upon receiving a wakeup signal, the system: restores full voltage to the instruction-processing portion of the processor; restores state information to the instruction-processing portion of the processor; and resumes processing of computer instructions.
Embodiment # 5: maintaining full voltage to the remaining portion of the processor involves maintaining full voltage to a snoop-logic portion of the processor, so that the processor can continue to perform cache snooping operations while the instruction-processing portion of the processor is in the reduced power mode.
Embodiment # 6: the system also reduces the voltage to a cache memory portion of the processor. In this embodiment, the system writes cache memory data to main memory prior to reducing the voltage.
Embodiment # 7: the remaining portion of the processor includes a control portion of the processor containing interrupt circuitry and clock circuitry.
Embodiment # 8: the remaining portion of the processor includes a cache memory portion of the processor.
NOTICE:
Macsimum News presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details.
neo@macsimumnews.com
Leave a comment ⇒
Please post the article topic & comment in our forums. No registration required.
Article Information
Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This
Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
