[gpderetta]

That's actually even worse: it will prevent the cpu to enter deep sleep states and save more power.

A while ago I was trying to minimize the power usage of my laptop (yeah, slow day) to maximize my battery time.

Armed with powertop, I removed any undesired process until I was left with an otherwise idle emacs (less than 1<% cpu) as the last major source of wakeups. Sure enough, disabling the blinking cursor brought that down to nothing, allowing the cpu to stay into deep sleep state much longer.