I suspect there is a tipping point, but that it&#x27;s probably much lower than you suggest:  maybe 10-25% of a single core, thus some single digit percentage of the entire processor.<p>Modern Intel processors can shut down unneeded cores almost completely, and frequency scaling gives you another range of efficient power reduction.  It&#x27;s only when you get lower than that that you are losing significant power at &#x27;idle&#x27;.<p>Unlike a small battery powered device, I&#x27;d guess that the difference in idle power for the CPU is never going to be the deciding factor, as keeping the non-CPU rest-of-the-machine running will dwarf the difference.  What workload would you envision as having the greatest advantage? Maybe if you were running a single instance per dedicated core?