[masklinn]

That's not really true though, or at least not on all workloads: much as you are not "throwing money away" by not pegging your car engine in the red zone 100% of the time, you're not throwing money away by not being at 100% CPU all the time, there are other metrics, values and issues to take in account e.g. a pegged CPU but an unresponsive computer is useless for a desktop, a pegged CPU which can't serve requests because the CPU is pegged because it's swapping like mad is useless for a server, so is a server at 100% CPU when there's no load on it which will just keel over when people start trying to actually interact with it.

[jeremyjh]

It sounds like you missed the point here. If an eight-core server is at 10% utilization, it effective has a single processor nearly pegged and the process doing it is thus CPU bound (and maybe serving responses at a high latency) while you have other cores sitting idle. Conserving CPU resources and running under capacity is wise, but has nothing at all to do with this comment.