I'm not an expert on this, and I don't know how the power-saving states for AMD processors work, but my understanding is that at least for modern Intel CPUs the

I'm not an expert on this, and I don't know how the power-saving states for AMD processors work, but my understanding is that at least for modern Intel CPUs the deepest power-saving states pretty much turn the core off. [1] Also, I'm not actually sure minimizing the clock frequency is going to maximize power savings. The voltage required for stable operation increases with the clock frequency, but the relationship is not linear. The top frequencies require proportionally higher voltage for the performance gains, so they are less power efficient. However, since the relationship is not linear, there may be a sweet spot between the minimum and the maximum with the lowest energy consumption per operation. [2] The power consumption per second will be at its lowest on the lowest clock frequency, but the power consumption for an entire computation might not be. [1] https://itigic.com/c-state-on-intel-processors-what-it-is-how-it-works/ https://itigic.com/c-state-on-intel-processors-what-it-is-ho... [2] Energy-Efficient Data Processing at Sweet Spot Frequencies; Götz et al., 2014; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-45550-0_18 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-45550-0_..., https://jorge-cardoso.github.io/publications/Papers/CP-2014-075-Frequencies-Energy-Efficient-Sweet-Spot.pdf https://jorge-cardoso.github.io/publications/Papers/CP-2014-...