Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, in april should appear, make use of the power saving RC6-features of Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors. As a result, the Linux operating system longer be able to run on laptops.
Canonical will be the RC6-ribbon, in which the gpu core is very little power consumption when the processor cores idle are, by default, in the Linux kernel of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to enable the hardware which is equipped with a Sandy Bridge or an Ivy Bridge processor. In doing so, the developers use the latest RC6-patches provided by Intel have been delivered, and probably in the 3.4 kernel will be processed. Canonical has these patches included in kernel 3.2.0-17.26. This kernel is currently available in the test versions of Ubuntu 12.04; Ubuntu developers asking for feedback from testers.
Until recently, the RC6-mode by default in the 3.3.x-ontwikkelkernel deactivated because the Intel-provided code is buggy. In particular, the highest energy saving level, the RC6p-mode, would cause problems. Intel says the bugs recently with a number of patches to have fixed, but for the security switches Ubuntu 12.04 the RC6p-mode is still not in.
Ubuntu and other distributions the improved power saving functionality in the Linux kernel to good use; the open-source OS turns out to be in practice faster a laptop to empty the draw than, for example, Windows 7. In addition, the activation of the RC6-mode as a convenient side-effect that the gpu will improve performance when using OpenGL graphics, as was shown recently from benchmarks of Phoronix.