A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.
What are some examples of power draw savings that Linux is leaving on the table?
“Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could have a stop-gap where run mode was customized in firmware.
Too much credit is given to Apple for “owning the stack” and too little attention to legacy x86 cruft that allows you to run classic Doom and Commander Keen on modern machines.
Where do you get this from? I could understand that they could get rid of the die area devoted to x86 decoding, but as I understand it x86 and x86-64 instructions get interpreted by the same execution units, which are bitness blind. What makes you think it's x86 support that's responsible for the vast majority of power inefficiency in x86-64 processors?
I'm confused, how is any of this related to "x86" and not the diverse array of third party hardware and software built with varying degrees of competence?
