A system may comprise a plurality of processing units, and a control unit and monitoring unit interfacing with the processing units. The control unit may receive requests for transitioning the processing units to respective target power-states, and specify respective target HW power-states corresponding to the respective target power-states. The monitoring unit may monitor operating characteristics of the system, and determine based on operating characteristics whether to allow the processing units to transition to the respective target hardware (HW) power-states. The control unit may be configured to change the respective target HW power-state to a respective updated HW power-state for each processing units for which it is determined that transition to its respective target HW power-state should not be allowed. The control unit may also be configured to infer a common target HW power-state based on the respective target HW power-states of processing units of a subset of the plurality of processing units, when the processing units of the subset of the plurality of processing units share at least one resource domain.