Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework

Anyone has experience with this? I recently reinstalled it and realized how invasive it is (three drivers, two services plus an "assistant" process, some injected DLLs) while bringing dubious benefits (some additional power settings unlocked, temperature and performance remain the same). This is on an ultra-low power laptop with only a heat sink and integrated graphics that rarely runs on battery power.

Feedback around the Internet ranges from "you need it to prevent your computer from melting down under high load" to "I had to uninstall it because it was permanently underclocking my processor to 400 MHz". If it does nothing truly relevant and turning it off doesn't result in any undesirable consequences, then I'd rather do exactly that. Especially after the fiasco that is the Intel Management Engine and its little brother the Trusted Execution Engine, which I had to remove by reflashing a hacked BIOS with a flash memory programmer; the less "mysterious" stuff I have running, the better.

I'd over/underclock directly in the BIOS if I were you.
I'm pretty sure that's all it does anyway and doesnt bring any added benefits to anyone that knows how to get into the bios.

Yes, I think you're right. I'll just uninstall the drivers and turn this off in the BIOS during my next reboot (full disclosure: months could pass until the latter, I never turn off my computer).

As it turns out, a browser crash and accidental logoff meant this reboot took less than a few months.

I cleanly uninstalled the drivers for this, turned it off, and have been running that way for over a week already. Temperature monitoring still works, Turbo Boost still works, processor temperature doesn't go beyond 60°C at full load on a warm spring day, and battery life is unaffected according preliminar testing. The thresholds for throttling and poweroff were separate settings in the BIOS and set to the lower 70s and lower 100s respectively, so they should still kick in too (apparently this processor can be slightly over the boiling point of water and still work).