Comment Re:idle time (Score 1) 533
The idle loop is alive and well in embedded systems. In some cases energy use is minimized by using a slow clock chosen for some small fraction of idle time, in others by sleeping between bursts of fast processing.
x86 idle power reduction under unix started sometime in the late 1990s
https://blogs.oracle.com/bholler/entry/the_most_executed_code_in
Other OS starting using it around 2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Idle_Process
Thus seti@home launched in 1999 could legitimately claim it made use of otherwise wasted CPU cycles on the Mac and Windows 95 clients.