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When I use the powertop command I get the following result:

Summary: 1089.0 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 27.2% CPU use

            Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
        182.5 ms/s     330.0        Process        /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr --sm-config-prefix /firefox-esr-klqqqA/ --sm-client-id 1012e4d86df26338ae1472160
          2.7 ms/s     139.4        Timer          hrtimer_wakeup
          0.8 ms/s     126.7        kWork          od_dbs_timer
          4.0 ms/s      95.6        Interrupt      PS/2 Touchpad / Keyboard / Mouse
          6.4 ms/s      67.4        Process        /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start
         21.3 ms/s      46.1        Process        gnome-shell --sm-client-id 106a72cd31b552c96146814382785334200000065240000
          1.7 ms/s      62.6        Process        /opt/teamviewer/tv_bin/teamviewerd -d
          1.5 ms/s      59.0        Timer          tick_sched_timer
          0.7 ms/s      47.7        Process        [rcu_sched]
         20.7 ms/s      22.7        Process        /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -novtswitch -background none -noreset -verbose 3 -auth /var/run/gdm3/auth-for-Debian-gdm-y51QIr/
        437.3 µs/s      16.5        Process        /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --plugin-dir=/usr/lib/mysql/plugin --user=mysql --log-er
          0.8 ms/s      12.2        Interrupt      [48] nouveau
          6.1 ms/s       6.3        kWork          nouveau_fence_work_handler
          0.9 ms/s       7.5        Process        ovs-vswitchd unix:/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock -vconsole:emer -vsyslog:err -vfile:info --mlockall --no-chdir --lo
          2.1 ms/s       5.9        Interrupt      [6] tasklet(softirq)
        619.4 µs/s       5.9        Interrupt      [9] RCU(softirq)
        181.4 µs/s       5.0        Interrupt      [4] block(softirq)
         96.6 µs/s       4.3        kWork          ieee80211_iface_work
        319.2 µs/s       3.7        Process        /usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
        421.4 µs/s       3.4        kWork          ttm_bo_delayed_workqueue
          1.1 ms/s       2.1        Process        /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/guake
          1.7 ms/s       1.0        Interrupt      [42] hpet4
        146.5 µs/s       1.1        Process        nm-applet
         15.8 µs/s       1.3        Timer          watchdog_timer_fn
         94.4 µs/s       1.2        Process        /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_flite /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/flite.conf
        696.9 µs/s       0.9        Interrupt      [7] sched(softirq)
          1.7 ms/s       0.3        Interrupt      [43] hpet5
          1.7 µs/s       0.9        kWork          blk_delay_work
          1.1 ms/s       0.3        Interrupt      [41] hpet3
         42.3 µs/s       0.7        Process        [ksoftirqd/0]
        236.3 µs/s       0.6        kWork          _brcms_timer
         88.7 µs/s       0.6        Process        /usr/bin/totem
         61.3 µs/s       0.6        Process        ovs-vswitchd
         51.3 µs/s       0.6        Process        /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_dummy /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/dummy.conf
          1.7 ms/s      0.00        Process        top
          1.3 µs/s       0.6        kWork          cfq_kick_queue
         93.6 µs/s       0.6        kWork          cache_reap
         43.0 µs/s       0.6        Process        /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_espeak /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/espeak.conf
         33.4 µs/s       0.6        Process        /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_cicero /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/cicero.conf

Some of the 'usage' statistics are in ms/s and others are µs/s. I want to know what these are, and how I can convert them to watts to determine power consumption.

Zanna
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pouya
  • 91
  • 1
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3 Answers3

11

When you have a laptop that can run on battery, in default interactive mode (launching with sudo powertop) on the overview tab, the first column shows estimated power consumption in mW (milliwatts) or µW (microwatts)

The units in the usage column are ms/s (milliseconds per second) and µs/s (microseconds per second) which show how much time per second the processor is spending on those tasks (so they can't be converted to watts)

PowerTOP 2.8      Overview   Idle stats   Frequency stats   Device stats   Tunables                                     

The battery reports a discharge rate of 3.51 W
The estimated remaining time is 9 hours, 32 minutes

Summary: 1017.3 wakeups/second,  7.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 3.8% CPU use

Power est.              Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
  1.97 W     50.0%                      Device         Display backlight
  980 mW      3.5 pkts/s                Device         Network interface: wlan0 (brcmfmac_sdio)
  100 mW    100.0%                      Device         radio:hci0
 43.3 mW      1.1 ms/s     559.1        Interrupt      [1] timer(softirq)
 22.6 mW      0.8 ms/s     290.8        Timer          intel_pstate_timer_func
 10.8 mW     15.3 ms/s      31.5        Process        /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
 9.62 mW    433.2 µs/s      14.6        Process        marco
 3.79 mW      6.9 ms/s      0.00        Interrupt      [7] sched(softirq)
 2.22 mW    204.1 µs/s      27.6        Interrupt      [6] tasklet(softirq)
 2.01 mW      3.6 ms/s      0.05        Process        [khugepaged]
 1.72 mW    459.2 µs/s      19.2        Process        /usr/lib/mate-panel/wnck-applet
 1.27 mW      2.2 ms/s       0.9        Process        /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -nolisten tcp :1 vt1 -keeptty -auth /tmp/serverauth.JdmwHkcqKp
 1.12 mW      1.0 ms/s       3.4        Process        mate-terminal
 819 µW       0.7 ms/s       5.5        Process        [mmcqd/0]

The man page for powertop seems to suggest that power usage (the first column) is only available while running on battery. However, I find that this is not the case - it always shows me that column on my Ubuntu machine, which is a laptop with a healthy battery

However @edwinksl very helpfully pointed out that 'a minimum of 270 measurements are needed' running on battery only to give power usage estimates. This is for calibration.

Therefore, it seems that you need to run powertop on battery only for some time before it can give power consumption statistics.

If running on a desktop machine or laptop with no battery of course, this information would never become available. I've tried it with a battery-less laptop (running Arch), and there's no sign of the power usage column.

One more caveat from the user guide - /var/cache/powertop must be empty for power consumption estimates to show.

Zanna
  • 70,465
0

please try

sudo powertop

and then press Shift+TAB to navigate to "Device stats", where you can see System baseline power is estimated at xxx W

System baseline power is estimated

sec
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if power estimation column is not shown on the powertop, then you can upgrade Ubuntu to the latest version. I upgraded 18.04 to 20.04 and now the powertop is showing power Est. column.

Ashiq Pathan
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