PowerNow! is the AMD power management technology. What it does is to match the CPU performance with the CPU usage in order to keep heat emission and power consumption at minimum - when there are no CPU consuming tasks it simply lowers the CPU clock and raises it back when some CPU intensive application needs it.
What does it have to do with Renoise? Quite a bit, as it can result in a very unpleasant effect, which I’m experiencing on my Mobile Athlon 64. Thing is that the process of loading a song into Renoise doesn’t generate much CPU use so the processor slows down. Then, when the song is played, the CPU usage rapidly increases so the processor has to speed up again, but before it notices it should, the CPU usage exceeds it’s power at the lower clock. This results in few seconds of very unpleasantly distorted audio output before the processor speeds up and playback gets back to normal.
As far as I know, the PowerNow! technology allows programs to tell the processor when to expect high CPU usage - so my request/suggestion is: could Renoise detect the presence of a PowerNow capable processor and set the processor to run at full speed for the time of playback (or during any audio activity)?