I keep thinking Intel should have something like big.LITTLE - chips with fast/power-hungry cores with other slower cores with low-power running the same ISA. Processes with lower priorities (or causing less load) could be moved to the power-conserving cores while stuff that creates large loads could occupy the faster ones. The threshold should be configurable so you could have as much or as little running on your power-conserving cores as you want your batteries to last. That, in addition to aggressively managing clock as we already do for power/thermal reasons should yield a very interesting generation of laptops.