Intel has released PowerTop, a tool designed to monitor what is causing your CPU to be active.

If your system is idle, your operating system tries to put the CPU into a low-power sleep state to reduce power consumption and thus extend battery life. The longer the CPU can remain in sleep states, the better. There are multiple sleep states, which save different amounts of power, but also take different time to “come back” into operation. If the operating system knows it can sleep a bit longer, it can use the more efficient modes.

However, some applications busy themselves unnecessarily, waking up without doing anything.

This is where the PowerTop tool comes in: it monitors which applications cause a wakeup from idle, to help developers find which applications might be wasting their power.

The application waking up most often on my system: Skype. Skype wakes up about 200 times per second, thus being a major blocker for using power-efficient CPU states.

I wouldn’t complain if it would at least be doing something, but this even happens when I’m logged off. It’s not even displaying an animation (and you don’t need 200 Hz for animations either!)

So you can probably extend your laptops battery life a slight bit by quiting skype. Funny, isn’t it?

Too bad that I need to use Skype to reach some people. I wish they’d all switch to some open protocol for IM. I mean, Skype’s IM sucks anyway…