Comment 180 for bug 524281

@Captain Chaos: To keep it short: These ticks are imposed by the Linux Kernel while trying to shift & balance the workload over the available CPU cores. The problem here is, that these "ticks" occur during idling phases and therefore inhibit the CPUs to fall into their power-saving states. A little annoying for mobile users as this reduced battery life and increases heat & fan activity. That's all.

This is a Linux kernel (not an Ubuntu) issue, so we just have to wait until Linus integrates the fixes into the mainline kernel to get rid of this annoyance. The Ubuntu & Kernel guys already took great actions to trigger a solution. Many thanks for that!