I am working on a traffic surveillance project which performs various image processing tasks with a number of visual sensors and a computing platform. My basic task in the project is the power optimization/management. I am using a ZOTAC-IONITX computing platform (Intel ATOM CPU + NVIDIA ION GPU). The problems that I am currently facing are:
I am unable to model the power consumption of various components e.g., processor, GPU, hard drive, memory etc, since there seems to be no way to measure the power consumption of individual system components. Since I don’t have a power consumption model, I cannot come up with a power optimization algorithm. I am currently working on Linux.
I would really appreciate any suggestions in this regard.
ACPI is designed to handle not only full system suspend/wakeup, but should work on a per-device base too. This should help you with testing the effect on overall system power consumption.
But first look at general recommendations for power management like this one for Gentoo and try the generic solutions, that others have done before.
You may already get what you want. After all ACPI is often referred to as complicated, and finding not much about selective suspend other than for USB (external) devices most likely indicates, it is not a great, or at least not an easy way to go. Depending on your expertise (in hardware and Gnu/Linux) you could still succeed, since a Linux OS tends to operate close to the hardware and is a powerful base for tricky computing operations in general.
But as Ben Voight said before, x86 is in general not the preferred platform for power-efficient applications, and you should better look for alternatives, if this is allowed inside your project task at all.