Matthew Garrett on the race to idle

> we normally modeled leakage as a constant.

My understanding is that leakage *current* is nearly constant (unless the voltage difference
is very small), so leakage power is proportional to voltage, and leakage energy is
proportional to voltage multiplied by time, i.e., voltage divides by frequency.  Since voltage
divides by frequency is increases not very much when you decrease frequency, this is nearly
constant energy.  If leakage *power* is constant instead, the leakage energy will be
proportional to the inverse of frequency.  Then voltage scaling would be doing something very
bad to energy consumption!