Comment 9 for bug 985661

It depends, but generally, if the machine isn't doing anything, the load should be zero or close to zero (e.g. less than 0.1). At least that's what it was with previous versions of ubuntu on the same machine. And it seems that this load is keeping my machine hot all the time.

For a conscious description check out the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_%28computing%29