Idle Cycles Are Not Wasted Cycles

arXiv:2607.16408v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Idle network service cores are treated as wasted compute. This assumption motivates increasingly sophisticated mechanisms that reclaim idle cores at microsecond timescales. We argue that this view no longer matches modern server hardware. On contemporary multicore processors, active cores compete for a shared package-level power and thermal budget. Once that budget becomes the limiting resource, an idle core that waits efficiently returns compute capacity that hardware can redistribute to productive work. Measurements on a recent AMD EPYC processor show how waiting strategy, processor topology, and idle duration determine this trade-off.