I also noticed the load average is way lower on the CPU now that it was. was always above 2 before. now hovers around 1.2. any additional benefit to these devices to run with lower/higher loads?
That's likely the advantage of the newer version. In principle it will lead to less lag time in keeping the device busy and less time to process and send shares. However cgminer is so heavily multithreaded that it probably won't matter since the latency critical parts of the cgminer code are already prioritised.