Comment 53 for bug 373245

For what it's worth, my problems seemed to be due to the ATI chipset and open source driver (not that the ATI one is better). With the same distribution copied on a thinkpad W500 and using the intel chip instead of the ATI one, I get a much better:

  36.0% ( 55.0) <interrupt> : ahci, yenta, i915@pci:0000:00:02.0
  31.0% ( 47.3) <kernel core> : hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer)

and can actually get consumption down to 11W or so, which is amazing for a big desktop replacement dual core duo with 1920x1200