#nocomments yes

D. Jansen has put up a blog story (http://linux-tipps.blogspot.com/2011/04/power-performance-of-pulseaudio-alsa.html) including some power saving results when running PulseAudio (http://pulseaudio.org/) on modern HDA drivers. This shows off some work Pierre-Louis Bossart from Intel did on the HDA drivers which now enables the timer-based scheduling code in PulseAudio I added quite some time ago to come to its full potential. You can save half a Watt and reduce wakeups while playing audio to 1 wakeup/s.

Previously there was little public profiling data available about the benefits PA brings you for low-power devices. Thanks to Dennis’ data there’s now public data available that hopefully explains why PA is the best choice for low-power devices as well as desktops. Hopefully this cleans up some misconceptions.

Pierre-Louis, thanks for your work!

Update: Arun Raghavan has posted a follow-up to this. (http://arunraghavan.net/2011/05/more-pulseaudio-power-goodness/)