Matthew Garrett on the race to idle

I wouldn't call Geode/OLPC 'designed for good power management': it's lower power than most
x86, sure, but isn't even in the same league as consumer device hardware like ARM and MIPS.
If you can actually measure the wake-from-sleep time at all, then you've lost.

Consumer hardware like the Nokia 770/N800/N810, OpenMoko, and similar, all races to sleep, and
sleeps/resumes much, much more often than you think (probably by a factor of thousands).  It
really can be about as transparent as the x86 execution/idle switch if your hardware is
decent, and you do it right.  Current Linux on ARM definitely does it right.

USB does make this more difficult by its very nature, but this isn't any more a problem with
the concept of race-to-sleep than FireWire's remote DMA security fiasco is a problem with the
concept of externally pluggable mass storage.