Power Efficient Software Coding

• Like 1800 INFORMATION said, avoid polling; subscribe to events and wait for them to happen
• Update window content only when necessary – let the system decide when to redraw it
• When updating window content, ensure your code recreates as little of the invalid region as possible
• With quick code the CPU goes back to deep sleep mode faster and there’s a better chance that such code stays in L1 cache
• Operate on small data at one time so data stays in caches as well
• Ensure that your application doesn’t do any unnecessary action when in background
• Make your software not only power efficient, but also power aware – update graphics less often when on battery, disable animations, less hard drive thrashing

And read some other guidelines. 😉

Recently a series of posts called “Optimizing Software Applications for Power”, started appearing on Intel Software Blogs. May be of some use for x86 developers.