Looks like it stays that way, it's been running for a few weeks that way (I can spare a core, heh).
It's Arch 64, OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.9.3) (ArchLinux-6.b20_1.9.3-1-x86_64), Core 2 Q6600, 8GB RAM, Radeon 5750.
Either your CPU is very slow, you're not using SDK 2.1, or your kernel is insane and you need to turn cpufreq off (sudo cpufreq-set -g performance -c 0, repeat and increment -c for each cpu core).