How to use Powertop

Question

I am working on power consumption anaysis of different machines we have in our lab ( servers, power pcs). I came to know about powertop for power analysis. till now, I have used it on my laptop only and analyse power when laptop is on battery and connected to power also(plugged). Now I have to move on servers etc. There are some questions in my mind and searched a lot but stilled confused. Please guide me about these questions.

1. Can powertop be used on PCs and servers ( having backups or not) 2. I experiment it and it worked on servers but watts etc colunm is not appeared that's what I main problem.
2. How watts etc can be appeared on powertop when running on servers. 4.If I sum all the power usage (watts etc colunm) on my laptop when plugged. Is that value total power comsumed on my system.
3. How much accurate powertop is(%).
4. What is working principle of powertop i.e. from where it get informations about power usage.Is it read some specific registers? If you donot want to give the answer of this question then just inform me a littlebit. I am a student and not belong to a big company.

Regards

Answer 1

PowerTOP is a software utility designed to measure, explain and minimise a computer's electrical power consumption. It was released by Intel in 2007 under the GPLv2 license. It works for Intel, AMD, ARM and UltraSPARC processors.

in order to use it, type powertop in terminal and it will start for more information you can go to its help command