Just discovered this - processor affinity, apparently useful for time-dependent (real-time) applications, so that your process doesn't get swapped to another processor. This ensures that timing code runs on only one processor, and will not suffer any ill effects from power management.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux ... inity.html
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/progr ... ent/?p=691

On linux:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/280909/cpu-affinity