In an embodiment, a local throttling mechanism for the one or more processor cores may support one or more externally-triggered throttling mechanisms. An external source, such as a system-level power manager, may detect an energy-consumption state in the system as a whole and may trigger additional throttling in the processor core throttling mechanism. The externally-triggered throttling may temporarily increase throttling in the processor cores, in an embodiment, decreasing processor core energy consumption to account for the excess energy consumption in other parts of the system.