


I totally agree with your friend, since when the CPU is apparently idle
it is still in fact churning away millions of instructions per second
(checking for keyboard input for instance).  

The exception to this is for CPU's used in laptops, where the CPU can
enter an idle state where it is just preserving its current status but
doing absolutely nothing.  In this case it needs a hardware interrupt
to get it going again.


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Victor Buttigieg					e-mail:	victor@uk.ac.man.ee.comms

Communications Research Group

University of Manchester
