# Intel Power Gadget

[Intel Power Gadget](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget/)
provides real-time graphs of various power-related measures and
estimates, all taken from the Intel RAPL MSRs. This article provides a
basic introduction.

**Note**: The [power profiling
overview](power_profiling_overview.md) is
worth reading at this point if you haven\'t already. It may make parts
of this document easier to understand.

The main strengths of this tool are (a) it works on Windows, unlike most
other power-related tools, and (b) it shows this data in graph form,
which is occasionally useful. On Mac and Linux, `tools/power/rapl`
[](tools_power_rapl.md) is probably a better tool
to use.

## Understanding the Power Gadget output

The following screenshot (from the Mac version) demonstrates the
available measurements.

![](https://mdn.mozillademos.org/files/11365/Intel-Power-Gadget.png)

The three panes display the following information:

-   **Power**: Shows power estimates for the package and the cores
    (\"IA\"). These are reasonably useful for power profiling purposes,
    but Mozilla\'s `rapl` utility provides these along with GPU and RAM
    estimates, and in a command-line format that is often easier to use.
-   **Frequency**: Shows operating frequency measurements for the cores
    (\"IA\") and the GPU (\"GT\"). These measurements aren\'t
    particularly useful for power profiling purposes.
-   **Temperature**: Shows the package temperature. This is interesting,
    but again not useful for power profiling purposes. Specifically,
    the temperature is a proxy measurement that is *affected by*
    processor power consumption, rather than one that *affects* it,
    which makes it even less useful than most proxy measurements.

Intel Power Gadget can also log these results to a file. This feature
has been used in [energia](https://github.com/mozilla/energia), Roberto
Vitillo\'s tool for systematically measuring differential power usage
between different browsers. (An energia dashboard can be seen
[here](http://people.mozilla.org/~rvitillo/dashboard/); please note that
the data has not been updated since early 2014.)

Version 3.0 (available on Mac and Windows, but not on Linux) also
exposes an API from which the same measurements can be extracted
programmatically. At one point the Gecko Profiler [used this
API](https://benoitgirard.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/correlating-power-usage-with-performance-data-using-the-gecko-profiler-and-intel-sandy-bridge/)
on Windows to implement experimental package power estimates.
Unfortunately, the Gecko profiler takes 1000 samples per second on
desktop and is CPU intensive and so is likely to skew the RAPL estimates
significantly, so the API integration was removed. The API is otherwise
unlikely to be of interest to GNU developers.
