Voltage and frequency scaling techniques that are based upon monitored data are provided. The techniques may be used to better manage the power and energy consumption of a processor in an embedded system, such as a cellular telephone, personal data assistant, smart device, or the like. The techniques may be used with processors that offer a performance monitoring capability. The performance monitor may monitor thread-level utilization at runtime. Instructions per cycle and memory references per cycle are example metrics that may be monitored by the performance monitor. The voltage and frequency scaling techniques may adjust the operating voltage and operating frequency of the processor based on the values of these two metrics. For example, the techniques may include accessing a voltage and frequency scheduler lookup table. The techniques may be employed with non-embedded systems, as well, embedded systems.