Get to know OS X Mavericks: Under the hood
OS X Mavericks has a lot of new features you can interact with and see. But Apple also took the time to implement several changes to the core of the operating system that help the system run better overall. These under-the-hood changes help boost performance and battery life.
Timer Coalescing
Intel's Haswell chip
Improvements to Haswell, Intel’s fourth generation of Core processors, which are now showing up in Macs, have focused primarily on boosting efficiency and reducing power consumption. Mavericks also has some tricks up its sleeve that Apple claims will let Mac users get even more work done on a single battery charge.
Running processors drain battery life, so Mavericks tries to put the CPU into an idle state whenever possible. Powering the processor back up to a ready state also requires a significant amount of energy, so it’s important to extend that power-sipping idle time long enough to provide real reduction in energy use.
The problem is that most applications aren’t aware the processor is taking a break, and they continually pester the processor to wake up and take care of small housekeeping chores in the background. These background processes may be necessary, but the various apps don’t coordinate the timing of their calls, which means the processor frequently has to power back up to handle these small tasks.
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