A power allocation strategy limits performance of a subset of a plurality of computational units in a computer system according to performance sensitivity of each of the plurality of computational units to a change performance capability, e.g., frequency change. The performance of the subset of computational units may be limited by setting a power state in which the subset may be operated and/or reducing a current power state of the subset to a lower power state. The subset whose performance is limited includes computational units that are least performance sensitive according to stored sensitivity data. The subset may include one or more processing cores and performance of the one or more processing cores may be limited in response to a CPU-bounded application or graphics processing unit (GPU)-bounded application being executed.