AMD has struggled of late to produce anything akin to a "good idea," but we've got to give a serious high five to senior VP and CMO Nigel Dessau on this one. While pumping gas one day and thinking about the low / high MPG ratings on vehicles, he began to wonder why laptops are being
left out of that scheme. Handsets have talk time / standby time, PMPs have separate longevity ratings for audio and video -- so why on Earth are we generally given just a single figure for laptops? Testing has shown that almost always the quoted figures from
laptop makers aren't even close to what users get in the real world, so Dessau is suggesting we implement a "guide rail" system that explains a maximum and minimum life expectancy. As for
Intel's take? "There are many ways to measure battery life. We believe the best way to determine how to measure battery life is by making proposals and debating it in industry consortiums and not via a blog post." Oh Intel, could you possibly be any more corporate?
[Via
HotHardware]
Read - AMD's take
Read - Intel's take
posted Mar 14th 2009 6:23PM
good idea is good
I think this question isn't that complex.
In my experience, if you are using your notebook with full brigtness, normal workload, it's around 50%of the claimed battery life.
If you are using it under full load, (playing 3D games and full brightness) , it is around 1/3 of the battery life.
Buy if you use min. Brightness and disable Bluetooth, wifi and just use Microsoft Word to type a document, it is possible to reach the claimed battery life.
4800 series was a good idea. Admittedly it was envisioned back in the ATI days, but still.
i thought this was going to be about an awesome new AMD-stamped battery with sensors that regulate the amount of juice to output based on these metrics.
instead we're going to get a chart? whatevs.
"There are many ways to measure battery life. We believe the best way to determine how to measure battery life is by making proposals and debating it in industry consortiums and not via a blog post."
What a Douche. But True.
They have a very valid point :)
Hope one day the industry adopts a new approach to battery life rating :)
That is actually close to real-life numbers. I'm sick of my 36-odd hour battery life claim on my iPod Touch only being 24-ish.
> Hope one day the industry adopts a new approach to battery life rating :)
I wonder what MPG the anti-virus I have installed on office notebook would score then. I think it could be used to validate the car analogy - with engine on and transmission in neutral gear - constantly.
The idea is nice, but for like 90% of PCs - or whatever atm Windows market share - is useless.
"There are many ways to state the obvious. We believe our company is about as agile as a 3-toed sloth and we only understand things presented to our suits in endless meetings and not by any method of communication that doesn't involve a TPS report"
Umm... yeah... I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one... You see, he's been having some trouble with his TPS reports...
a wonderful plan, go amd!
I would like to consort myself in one of these industry debates, it sounds like they magically make good ideas more valid.
Whatevs.
Why does Intel act so formal? As if ideas communicated through a blogging medium are any less valid than ideas discussed in countless, pointless meetings with "marketing" managers and technical analyzers. It sounds like it could be good, so why shun it out? I still have love for you, Intel, but competition is not going to go away simply because you denounce its existence or relevance.
What we need, is to stop taking the word of talking heads. Seriously, the manufacturers lie lie lie, and the columnists spin everything in a positive way so they don't lose their "exclusive" tips from the corporate reps.
We need a widely-used cross-platform application, like a Firefox plug-in perhaps, which watches the battery charge-discharge-recharge cycle, and reports statistics back to a central server. It's utility would be to warn the user when their battery has begun to behave less than par for a battery of it's age, in a PC of that particular model. It could even warn when the battery is giving signs that it is about to fry. Some batteries can even be polled for their serial number and temperature, along with remaining charge, etc. The user would provide the purchase date and purchase source, so the source of substandard batteries can be tracked throughout the population.
I'm sure the battery manufacturers would attempt to use DMCA to squelch the truth, but it's important to provide the public with an unbiased, independent source of data.
love that idea to be honest(Y) the same could be implemented for many other components
I'm sure spyware sending reports over wifi all the time won't affect batterydrain either huh.
You should be on some senate committee.. (that wasn't a compliment)
Thumbs up for AMD on this one. Though it will probably be hard to determine whats a good measuring stick, phones have talk time and pmp have video and music time. I don't see why they all can't have the same measurement like mpg, where you just measure how long can it last running the most cpu intensive job that the machine can produce.
That is silly, the CPU is just one component, what if you don't run CPU intensive tasks but use wifi or bluetooth a lot, then the power wifi/BT uses is what counts for you and those reports on CPU draining the battery are useless.
Or what if you have a chipset that reduces blu-ray decoding to 20% CPU and another device doesn't and you watch bluray often? There are many ways and combinations of use.
FAK!
This is what laptop reviews are for. If the consumer can't be bothered to make an informed decision of their own volition, do they have the right to be upset by the obvious marketing-speak later? Are you really going to impulse buy a multi-hundred dollar product? Because if so, you obviously have the disposable income to do so.
"HEY GUYS! I've got an idea! Let's not lie about our products' battery life anymore!"
"Shut UP, Barry!"
No doubt they're outright lying in most cases. In others, they are simply advertising the best battery life achievable through disabling hardware essential to the actual operation of the laptop. I'm just saying that this isn't the only case where marketing stretches the truth about their product in order to sell said product, and that if you really care enough to know what you're getting into, you will probably do a simple checkup on the thing you're buying. Most people can't be bothered to do this with the simple things, but when it comes to something that can cost anywhere between a couple hundred to thousands of dollars...
Totally. The new 17-inch MacBook Pro has a claim of "8hrs of battery life" but even in moderate use, no user is EVER going to get anything near that number. I'd just like companies to stop lying out their asses about how long a battery can last with a single charge.
Funny that people all over the place are claiming to get between 7 and 9 hours.
The users are always the ones short changed and deceived. Have you heard of PMPO 2000watts only to only actually have 150watts in real application. AMD go ahead
There is a very good benchmark for measuring battery life during an active workload in 4
different scenarios called MobileMark 2007 by BAPCo.
From the article:
"Most PC battery time metrics are achieved by looking at how long the battery lasted running a benchmark called MobileMark® 2007 (MMO7). This is a rating of battery life when your PC is running on average less than 5% utilized – or fundamentally idle. Most PC makers don’t even turn Wi-Fi on for this test. Is this realistic based on how you use your PC?"
AMD guy kinda bashes that program.
Apparently the industry uses the least active workload.
Sounds good to me.
High Load: Playing a 1080p HD file looped.
Low Load: Playing a SD file looped.
Decent representations of constant load. Or maybe low load can be playing badger badger badger on 2 tabs.
In this day and age, all battery life measurements should at *least be taken with reasonable brightness settings and wifi on. Who *doesn't* use wifi or WAN on their notebooks?
Intel, when they test the battery life
Why not have multiple types of loads and their times?
Such as 5% load, 50% load, 80% load and 100% load?
It wouldn't be too hard to measure that several times and get an average for each figure. Light, Moderate, Heavy and Extreme times.
Hard drives, CPUs, GPUs - even notebook speakers - all have different power consumption types. If you mix them, then the resulting /metric/ would be as good as useless: or always very low (e.g. when all resources actively used; bad for marketing) or too high (... as it is right now).
I have spent two years at Intel. IMHO until they won't get rid of the arrogant , more inclined to finance rather to innovation CEO , Intel won't be associated with any kind of bright ideas. The principle of today's Intel Corp Culture IMHO is that " Initiative fucks the initiator" and the worst thing is that the proponents of current status quo are those who does not really care about making this world better place to live they just care about their own asses not being fired in today's "tough economic situtations". It was very pathetic to see how those who really were bothered and wanted to make something inovative be it process flow or anything else were just unable to sell their ideas through the iron walls of middle and higher managers' inflexibility.
It was not the managers who made this company tick tock... i really loved this company and have nothing bad to say about 99 per cent of my colleagues there but it was painful to see at the same time that cannot do anything against the bureaucracy and narrow mindness of MBA stemmed managers, this company's corp culture has been inspired by the engineers,i e scientists, not the bullshit MBA politicians.
Sincirely , Aurel
I don't see why intel cares really, they ALL use the blasted atom now and those use what they use and even if VIA or AMD or whoever makes a better lowpower CPU they will still keep putting damn atom CPU's in everything because of the ridiculous over-reporting of atom as being some sort of wonder chip makes people want atom notebooks, even to the point that they don't care if they can get a core2 powered real notebook with equal batterylife for the same price.
don't they already have that for geeky sites, (It would still be cool if some standard came out)
Okay, I'll got one step farther down the highway of disrespect, according to Intel, and suggest an idea in the comment section of a blog. It's been on my mind for many years now, and I would love to see AMD run with it.
The type of battery that resides in most laptops today, lithium-ion, lives a much longer life when NOT fully charged, yet the simplistic battery management system (BMS) in our computers just tops up the charge until full, then holds it there as long as you are plugged in.
For those who rarely untether their laptop from our clean-coal grid, I'd like to suggest that the battery power mode selector have a new option nestled between max-performance and max-run-time, that of baby-my-battery. There are well understood methods of extending the life of various battery chemistry, so my idea would be a very simple software implementation, virtually free of charge to the vendor (I'm so punny, I know).
Of course, an algorithm to extend battery life would have a couple of downsides for both users and industry, namely that of forgetting to top up the pack to full before leaving (it would likely float between 40-80 of capacity), and not having to buy a new pack for the life of the computer. A minor inconvenience on one hand, and a better use of resources on the other - sorry industry, but plans for infinite expansion and profitability are not logical in the face of a finite resource base.
You can bet that we'll see pretty sophisticated charge algorithms in the coming wave of lithium powered hybrid cars, where the pack life is a make or break business deal. The Prius already uses a BMS to hold its battery to within a few percent of optimum, hence we have these cars running on NiMH packs for a decade or more in many instances.
Somebody, please make my idea a reality - I'm not smart enough to do it myself.
The problem with this is that its so obvious a self serving move that you couldn't get any more obvious; other then if he came out and said Intel is kicking our ass with their core series so we need to change what battery life and performance means.
You want real world figures? Wait for a laptop review. Places like notebookreview.com is a good example. They give real world figures on notebook performance and then just go to the forums and start monitoring what people are saying. The net is a wonderful place to get this info....but it does require some looking.
regardless wether it is right or wrong about the battery, to poo-poo freely available market reserch that has more credibility then people pushed into questionaires is stupidity at its most.
Pity more companies don't take there customers more seriously and just listen to them.
This would be so easy to implement. Just standardize the rating systems. Some good bench marks could include:
1) Full use of everything. 100% CPU, Disk IO, Bluetooth, Wifi, Sound, etc. Just pump random data to everything.
2) Play a DVD in a loop until the battery dies.
3) Browse the top 100 sites in a loop saying at each for 15 seconds.
4) Same as #1 only 50% to everything.
Something has to be done to regulate this. 5 hours on a MacBook my ass. Maybe with the screen off in standby, but not doing any sort of real work.
"The problem with this is that its so obvious a self serving move that you couldn't get any more obvious"
This reminds me a lot of Blackadder's infamous "Disease and deprivation stalk our land like... two giant stalking things."
The problem is we accept a lack of standards with such profound arguments as "read a review". Seriously? I can't see why anyone would disagree with the argument being made here-- anything that makes things clearer for purchasers is a good thing.
So isn't the end game of this how the manufactures of each notebook claim the battery life?
Intel and AMD don't set these numbers.. HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Apple do.
I guess I must be a corporate suit, when I see Intel's point that cheer leading an idea about this on a blog post versus getting the entire industry to change together makes little sense. unless of course you want to be a cheerleader instead of an industry leader.
While one can certainly debate the overall efficacy (time will tell in that regard), what evidence do we have that said industry wishes to change at all? One way or the other, change needs to be helped along by the consumers so seeking input on the matter could, theoretically, provide both input/insight on how change needs to occur and evidence that consumers want it to happen.
Will it lead to anything? Who knows, but I don't get the criticism of the position.
That is MY word. Whatev.
How much for this new laptop battery? --- http://www.laptopbatteryweb.com/