Power management

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Some electrical appliances, particularly photocopiers, computers, central processing units, graphics processing units, and other computer components and peripherals like monitors and printers, have a feature called power management that, when the device is not in use, either turns off the power or puts the system into a low-power state. In the field of computers, this concept is referred to as PC power management, and it is based on a standard known as ACPI; APM has been superseded by ACPI. Support for ACPI is included in all modern PCs.

A microprocessor's power management may be performed on the whole processor or on individual components, such as the cache memory and the main memory.

This reduces the amount of power used by the computer, but may result in a drop in performance. In order to maximise the power-performance tradeoff, this may sometimes be done in real time.