dynamic voltage and frequency scaling is an effective way to reduce energy and power consumption in microprocessor units . current implementations of dvfs suffer from inaccurate modeling of power requirements and usage , and from inaccurate characterization of the relationships between the applicable variables . a system and method is proposed that adjusts cpu frequency and voltage based on run - time calculations of the workload processing time , as well as a calculation of performance sensitivity with respect to cpu frequency . the system and method are processor independent , and can be applied to either an entire system as a unit , or individually to each process running on a system .