Disable sleep states on P7+

[Steven Pratt]

I am looking for info on when and how we are able to disable power saving features of current (P7, P7+) chips in order to reduce latency. This is often done in latency sensitive applications when power consumption is not an issue. On Intel boxes we can disable P-state frequency changes as well as disabling C-State or sleep state changes. In fact we can control how deep a sleep the processor can go into.  I know we have control Dynamic Processor Scaling and Idle Power Savings, but what states do these really affect?  Can I really disable Nap mode of a processor? If so how?  Can I disable even the lightest winkle mode?  Looking for current information (read RHEL 6 and SLES11), future changes are interesting.

Steve