Intel promises to double battery life

 

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Posted on 25 Jun 2008 at 12:34

Laptop users could soon enjoy far longer battery life and all computer users could cut electricity bills, according to Intel, who are in the final development stages of a new power management tool.

According to Justin Rattner, the company's chief technology officer, Platform Power Management is in end-stage research and should be seen in computers in the "coming months or years".

The company says the system works by continually monitoring changes in a computer's operations and reducing power, or turning it off altogether, to portions of the system that are not in use, such as the radio or USB ports.

"We've already seen reductions in power of 30 per cent, and we think we'll half it soon," said Rattner.

While developers and researchers have long been working on power management - with sleep and hibernate modes improving battery life, and Intel's Atom processor able to go to sleep on six different levels - the new management goes much further.

The company says the software is aware of what power is required throughout the entire computer and will shut down all applications that are not needed at any given time.

Intel says current power usage is wasteful, citing examples such as the screen; when you are reading an email, the image is refreshed needlessly 60 times a second. Under the new system the screen would maintain the same image until the user scrolls down or moves the mouse, says Intel.

Similarly USB devices and even keyboards draw power constantly even when they are not in use and awaiting instructions. In future they will be put to sleep when not in use and fire back up - with a delay of some 50 milliseconds - when consumers start to type again.

Any unused parts of the chip would also be put to sleep and only brought back online when applications required the processing power.

"It employs tactics like reducing polling so the system is not constantly going backwards and forwards with unnecessary information," said Rattner. "It works across the entire platform, including the operating system and should drastically reduced power consumption during both active and idle processes. It could double the battery life in mobile devices."

Author: Stewart Mitchell