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US 8,806,258 B2Granted
Platform communication protocol
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsSeh W. Kwa, Neil Songer, Rob Gough, David J. Harriman
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A host chipset heartbeat may be utilized, in some embodiments, to handle interrupts from external devices on a power efficient basis. The availability of the host chipset heartbeat may be signaled to external devices and those external devices may time their activities to a period of time when not only are resources available, but the assertion of the activity is advantageous because the host chipset is already transitioning from a lower power consumption state.
Claims22
A computer readable medium storing instructions to enable a computer to:
- identify heartbeats that are non-periodic time windows of computer resource availability of a system, wherein at least some of the heartbeats correspond to power state transitions of the system;
- and
- provide an in-band signal to a device external to said computer to enable said device to time its interaction with the system to the heartbeats, said device being awake when it receives said signal, wherein the in-band signal is to comprise a message packet that is to include a message code field and in-band message data, the message code field is encoded to indicate the in-band message data and the in-band message code is to be encoded to indicate to the device an activity state of a particular computer resource of the system.
A system comprising:
- a host chipset;
- an external device coupled to said host chipset;
- and
- said host chipset to initiate an in-band messaging signal to enable the external device to time its interaction with the host chipset to a host chipset non-periodic time window of computer resource availability, only if said device is awake when it receives said signal, wherein the time window corresponds to a power state transition of the host chipset and the in-band signal is to comprise a message-type packet that is to include a message code field and in-band message data, the message code field is encoded to indicate the in-band message data, and the in-band message code is to be encoded with a value to indicate to the external device an activity state of a particular computer resource of the host chipset.
1 more element
An apparatus comprising:
- a component to:
- identify non-periodic time windows of computer resource availability of a system, wherein at least some of the windows correspond to power state transitions of the system;
- and
- send a message to a device coupled to said system to coordinate activities of said device that involve said system to the non-periodic time windows of resource availability when said device is awake when it receives said message, wherein the message is to comprise a message packet that is to include a message code field and in-band message data, the message code field is encoded to indicate the in-band message data, and the in-band message code is to be encoded with a value to indicate to the device an activity state of a particular computer resource of the system.
1 more element
An apparatus comprising:
- a component to:
- identify non-periodic time windows of computer resource availability of a system, wherein at least some of the windows correspond to power state transitions of the system;
- and
- send a PCIe-compliant message packet to a device coupled to said system to coordinate activities of said device that involve said system to the non-periodic time windows of resource availability when said device is awake when it receives said message, wherein the message packet is to include an in-band message code field to be encoded with a binary value corresponding to a respective one of a plurality of available activity states of a particular computer resource of the system and the message code field is included in Byte 15 of the message packet.
1 more element
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.