Windows 10 Redstone 3 Insider Preview Adds Power Throttling And Revert VM

After all of the hype and anticipation leading up to the public release of the Creators Update for Windows 10, you might be left wondering, what's next? Well, there is another major update to Windows 10 that is scheduled for later this year. Called Redstone 3 for now, Microsoft has already begun dishing out test builds to Windows Insiders, the latest of which introduces power throttling.

There are two builds available, one for PC (16179) and one for mobile (15205). Both are available to Windows Insiders subscribed to the Fast ring, which receives pre-release builds of Windows 10 ahead of everyone else. This allows Microsoft to test cutting edge features before before rolling them out more broadly, including Windows Insiders in the Slow ring.

In this case, Microsoft is continuing with one of the experimental power features it rolled out in January with build 15002. That feature is power throttling, a promising addition that showed to have up to 11 percent savings in CPU power consumption in strenuous use cases. As of this latest build, the power throttling feature is turned on for everyone. The caveat is that users need a relatively modern system to use it—a 6th generation Intel Core processor or beyond.


"To give great performance to the apps you’re using, while at the same time power throttling background work, we built a sophisticated detection system into Windows. The OS identifies work that is important to you (apps in the foreground, apps playing music, as well as other categories of important work we infer from the demands of running apps and the apps the user interacts with)," Microsoft explains.

According to Microsoft, its power throttling scheme works for most apps, though there might be some that are negatively impacted. Learning which ones those are and then figuring out why is the purpose of rolling this feature out to Windows Insiders.

The other noteworthy feature introduced in built 16179 is Revert VM. In an effort to simplify Hyper-V for developers on Windows 10, Microsoft has introduced automatic checkpoints. If a developer makes a mistake, he or she can use Revert VM to roll back to the last time a virtual machine was started.

Microsoft also fixed a handful of issues, both for PC and mobile, though nothing real exciting for either platform.