This white paper presents an in-depth but accessible introduction to the capabilities and future of tickless idle. It particularly presents techniques for making daemons and drivers tickless-friendly, with an eye toward extending the real-world benefits of the technology to the community.

In conjunction with the overall power-saving capabilities of the hardware that are introduced with Intel® Intelligent Power Technology, tickless idle is a very important capability. The new generation of smart hardware/software stacks helps reduce total operating costs in the data center, as well as reducing the environmental impact of enterprise computing.