+Arjan van de Ven +H. Peter Anvin Some folks internally have been arguing (and with data that appears to support their thesis) that with modern Intel processors, the ondemand CPU governor is actually counterproductive because waking up to decide whether the CPU is idle keeps it from entering the deepest sleep states, and so (somewhat counterintuitively) the performance governor will actually result in the best battery life.

Can you confirm?  And if so, what's the first CPU architecture where this is true?   Sandy Bridge?  Ivy Bridge?    And should we perhaps make the on-demand governor automatically deactivate itself on sufficiently new architectures?  I looked to see if there was any useful information on www.lesswatts.org, but apparently that domain has been allowed to expire.