The power measurement setup consists of a current probe (A clamp ammeter that converts current to voltage rather than displaying it, and that can be connected to DMM) so that we can measure current thru CPU power lines w/o any cutting and soldering... This is then plugged into a DMM via banana plugs. The DMM then sends the data to the logger machine over RS232. The logger machine polls the serial port periodically and collects all the data. The monitoring software we developed Power Meter & Power Plotter then plot the measured power over a sliding timeline of 100s (=1000 power samples) every 100ms. They are all threaded so that serial sampling time, display granularity and plotting update time can all be set independently. All the greaphical monitor are implemented with libplot library, and can be sent to an X-drawable, ps, pseudo-GIF, etc.

I have (FINALLY) developed a complete framework that models 22 physical component powers for a P4 (Willamette) processor using performance counter data collected at runtime with the help of Performance Reader and that measures real time processor power for verification.