AWS Process State Control Feature

Question

How to use the processor state control feature available on the  c4.8xlarge instance?

Answer 1

The processor state control consists of 2 states:

• The C state – Sleep state varying from c0 to c6. C6 being the deepest sleep state for a processor
• The P state – Performance state p0 being the highest and p15 being the lowest possible frequency.

Now, why the C state and P state. Processors have cores, these cores need thermal headroom to boost their performance. Now since all the cores are on the processor the temperature should be kept at an optimal state so that all the cores can perform at the highest performance.

Now how will these states help in that? If a core is put into sleep state it will reduce the overall temperature of the processor and hence other cores can perform better. Now the same can be  synchronized with other cores, so that the processor can boost as many cores it can by timely putting other cores to sleep, and thus get an overall performance boost.

Concluding, the C and P state can be customized in some EC2 instances like the c4.8xlarge instance and thus you can customize the processor according to your workload.