If I had a 16-cell battery on the tiniest little netbook, like I've seen available for the Acet Aspire one, it probably could. It's a bit extreme considering the standard battery is 3-cell.
If you think get say a 5 hour battery life out of an 80WHr cell, that means the laptop is using 16 watts. If you subtract .5W you get 15.5 watts which gives a battery life of 5 hours 9 minutes 40 seconds.
Less than 10 additional minutes of battery life is nowhere near an hour.
I'm guessing this is on ivy bridge/next generation atom ultra-portables. IB is supposed to be much lower power than SB while idling; and IIRC atom based netbooks use about 5 of their 10W idle power consumption on the LCD. With high end netbooks getting >10hrs of runtime now, and next generation CPUs cutting the non-display fraction of idle power significantly getting an extra hour isn't unreasonable. The gain would ofc be much smaller on your 14" general use, or 17" gaming laptop/mobile workstation.
Contemporary laptops can idle at 5 - 7 W and approach 10 h of run time. For these I can see the claim of "up to 1 h more" be true. Not if you're running a discrete GPU, though.
With both AMD and NVIDIA doing dynamic switchable graphics (not that AMD doesn't have plenty to improve with their implementation), we're now down to ~6W idle power draw on dual-core SNB laptops. With a 56Wh battery, that works out to 9.3 hours of idle battery life for 6W, and if they can drop that to 5.5W we'd be at 10.2 hours. So you're right about the numbers. Of course, other less-power-optimized laptops only idle at 10-11W, so those wouldn't see as much of a gain.
...but I'm just wondering why it wasn't considered before. Anything to reduce GPU power and PCI-Express bandwidth is a good thing. Perhaps the next step would be to evaluate frame-by-frame on the PC and transmit only the amended data... though I could be going way too far with this.
Refresh rate is 60 Hz. A lot of it the screen images are static for a large amount of these 1/60 s intervals, as long as you're not gaming or watching movies.
On this very site my friend, i don't know about you but i don't have a per second clock on my desktop, nor am i moving my mouse around while i read articles, so at the very least if i'm reading a dense page, my CPU and GPU can effectively power down for up to a minute until my clock ticks over to display the next minute. instead of constantly firing out the same image to the lcd.
Oh man, I can hear the customer support calls already. "I turned off my computer but the screen is still on, and it's not moving, it's broken and I need a new one". Lol. Except for stupid people this looks awesome. Definitely gonna be on my next laptop. Wish this had come out years ago.
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quiksilvr - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
0.5W = 1 hour battery life? On a phone I can see that, but on a notebook? Highly unlikely.CZroe - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
If I had a 16-cell battery on the tiniest little netbook, like I've seen available for the Acet Aspire one, it probably could. It's a bit extreme considering the standard battery is 3-cell.DarthPierce - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
yea... not gonna happen.If you think get say a 5 hour battery life out of an 80WHr cell, that means the laptop is using 16 watts. If you subtract .5W you get 15.5 watts which gives a battery life of 5 hours 9 minutes 40 seconds.
Less than 10 additional minutes of battery life is nowhere near an hour.
DanNeely - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I'm guessing this is on ivy bridge/next generation atom ultra-portables. IB is supposed to be much lower power than SB while idling; and IIRC atom based netbooks use about 5 of their 10W idle power consumption on the LCD. With high end netbooks getting >10hrs of runtime now, and next generation CPUs cutting the non-display fraction of idle power significantly getting an extra hour isn't unreasonable. The gain would ofc be much smaller on your 14" general use, or 17" gaming laptop/mobile workstation.DanNeely - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Correction: Haswell, not ivy bridge for the major power savings.MrSpadge - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Contemporary laptops can idle at 5 - 7 W and approach 10 h of run time. For these I can see the claim of "up to 1 h more" be true. Not if you're running a discrete GPU, though.MrS
JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
With both AMD and NVIDIA doing dynamic switchable graphics (not that AMD doesn't have plenty to improve with their implementation), we're now down to ~6W idle power draw on dual-core SNB laptops. With a 56Wh battery, that works out to 9.3 hours of idle battery life for 6W, and if they can drop that to 5.5W we'd be at 10.2 hours. So you're right about the numbers. Of course, other less-power-optimized laptops only idle at 10-11W, so those wouldn't see as much of a gain.silverblue - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
...but I'm just wondering why it wasn't considered before. Anything to reduce GPU power and PCI-Express bandwidth is a good thing. Perhaps the next step would be to evaluate frame-by-frame on the PC and transmit only the amended data... though I could be going way too far with this.Zandros - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
… that it would be beneficial to blink the caret less often then.Zandros - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I also guess that people will hate animated ads even more.FITCamaro - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
How many people have a static screen for any real length of time when the laptop is being used?MrSpadge - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Refresh rate is 60 Hz. A lot of it the screen images are static for a large amount of these 1/60 s intervals, as long as you're not gaming or watching movies.Mrs
krazyderek - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
On this very site my friend, i don't know about you but i don't have a per second clock on my desktop, nor am i moving my mouse around while i read articles, so at the very least if i'm reading a dense page, my CPU and GPU can effectively power down for up to a minute until my clock ticks over to display the next minute. instead of constantly firing out the same image to the lcd.Hrel - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Oh man, I can hear the customer support calls already. "I turned off my computer but the screen is still on, and it's not moving, it's broken and I need a new one". Lol. Except for stupid people this looks awesome. Definitely gonna be on my next laptop. Wish this had come out years ago.