  In this paper we study the power-performance relationship of power-efficient
computing from a queuing theoretic perspective. We investigate the interplay of
several system operations including processing speed, system on/off decisions,
and server farm size. We identify that there are oftentimes "sweet spots" in
power-efficient operations: there exist optimal combinations of processing
speed and system settings that maximize power efficiency. For the single server
case, a widely deployed threshold mechanism is studied. We show that there
exist optimal processing speed and threshold value pairs that minimize the
power consumption. This holds for the threshold mechanism with job batching.
For the multi-server case, it is shown that there exist best processing speed
and server farm size combinations.
