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Intel: consumers not bright enough for discussion
AMD WANT PEOPLE TO believe they care about battery life. Intel, however, want you to know it's all too complicated for mere mortal consumers.
AMD's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Nigel Dessau, recently told the INQ he was well and truly fed up of not getting bang for his buck on notebook batteries, or, at the very least, getting as much battery juice as was estimated on the label.
It is a fair point. Currently punters looking to buy a laptop will get an estimate for battery life derived from the Mobile Mark benchmark test, which only takes a few basic productivity programmes into account, stressing the CPU all of five per cent.
That's right, open up Photoshop, run a Blue-Ray film, or even use tweetdeck, and users can watch their estimated battery time flush itself down the toilet. Oh, and Mobile Mark doesn't take "wireless enabled" into account, so if you use the Internet, you can forget those four hours the little sticker on your new laptop box promised you.
This, says Dessau, is not right, especially since mobile phone makers quote "talk time" estimates and car makers give petrol consumption per mile predictions to help consumers choose to suits their needs. Surely computer makers should adhere to the same practice, Dessau notes.
What's more, Dessau and his team of AMD bloggers and twits (twitterers, rather) have started to relentlessly evengalise to all and sundry that the industry is in desperate need of a "guard rail" system, to give potential buyers a more accurate maximum and minimum life expectancy.
One suggestion AMD has put forward for discussion on a company blog is the use of 3DMark06, taxing about 50 per cent of a system's capability, instead of Mobile Mark's five per cent.This, notes Dessau, is just a starting point for discussion, adding "We're trying to engage the community in a conversation."
Intel, however, disagrees that riff-raff like consumers should be involved in any sort of discussion, noting "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 blog post."
Industry consortiums, eh? Interesting. So does this imply Intel is suggesting we completely ignore corporate blogs? Is this Chipzilla's new social media strategy? If so, should we ignore Intel blogs from now on, or has the firm dumbed those down enough for us simpletons to understand?
We decided to give SpIntel another chance to explain itself. "We are always delighted to chat about benchmarking with our industry colleagues" backtracked Chipzilla's Czar of PR, Nick Knuppfer, telling the INQ Intel in fact did so on a regular basis "though the industry consortiums that do the hard job of bringing the world industry standard benchmarks". He added, however that if AMD was serious about changing the way MobileMark worked, the firm should bring its new ideas to the industry as a whole, cautioning "But lets keep the topic of benchmarking serious, not as a way of trying to win PR brownie points".
Meanwhile, Ian McNaughton of AMD told the INQ "The battery life discussion is bigger than Intel,it's bigger than AMD, it is an industry discussion. We're simply asking the question are the correct benchmarks in place to accurately represent the consumer's battery life experience' when they get their new laptop home from the store".
In our humble INQ opinion, a sit down for open discussion would certainly be a good thing, but with only two* (*cough*) players in the industry, and one of them significantly larger, it will probably never happen. That's because it's in Intel's interest to ignore the issue, and AMD spamming a few hundred people on twitter and writing a plethora of blog posts will probably not force Chipzilla to do otherwise, unfortunately.
Still, at the moment, just like a Duracell battery, this discussion seems set to keep going and going.µ
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Until battery technology improves, or process technology shrinks a few generations, there's not much to be done.
We expect more from these things every year though. I wonder how much slower a modern laptop battery would drain surfing the web circa 1992 as opposed to today.
Wanted to improve battery life so I connected an ammeter to power supply
BIOS is locked
I noticed Ubuntu tells me CPU speed cannot be changed.
Sillyron is a castrated Core2, to protect la intella's upscale market
Ammeter LCD reads "Intel sucks"
Those guys will never learn
Intel has it right, people are too stupid to comprehend battery life.
Rating how long your battery should last, would be like rating how long your car should run, now how many MPG it gets!!!!
Obviously how long it will run is going to depend on what the hell the vehicle is doing regardless of MPG.
Is the AMD spokesman that stupid?
Are the Techies reading this that stupid?
So, let me get this right. AMD does not like the current rules on power consumtion when it comes to CPU. Prob cuz it does not show them in a very flattering postion. OK, so AMD just has to change the rules to make them look better. hummm sound like a good plan. if you cant compete, just change the rules till you can....
In fact this topic is far more sophisticated than described here in this article. Intel is chairing an industrial consortium in this matter - the EBL workgroup. EBL stands for extended battery life and its concern is the whole NB system including battery safety. Many relevant companies are members and do actually also gather information and data from the public.
So, be open-minded and don't judge too early.
Should be: AMD user, not stupid enough to use Intel.
Or better; the age old: Intel inside....
It's not Duracell, it's Energizer.
I really don't quite understand what's IQ's stance against Intel's suggestion for a consortium. I fully agree with Intel that a discuss should be held at the industry level, not at a blogging level. TBH I don't even think Nigel's attempt was an official one, since anyone with a basic fundamental understanding of computer usage would know that 3DMark06 is a horrible, horrible way to measure battery life, as it stresses way too much on graphical processor. IMO AMD is trying to use this opportunity to stress their IGP's power efficiency.
INTEL:"though[sic] the industry consortiums that do the hard job of bringing the world industry standard benchmarks"
AMD:"The battery life discussion is bigger than Intel,it's bigger than AMD, it is an industry discussion."
AMD themselves are saying that this discussion is bigger than any particular company. Do you think you can decide industry-wide standards through a blog post??? That will just lead to confusion. Intel is right, all they are saying is that we should have a uniform standard for the industry, which should be decided by all the companies together, which can only happen in a consortium and not on a blog.
You're just misinterpreting Intel's words.
MobileMark is made by Bapco.
At the launch date of mobilemark2007, Current BAPCo membership includes: AMD, Apple, ARCintuition, Atheros Communications, CNET, Compal, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Toshiba, VIA Technologies, VNU Business Publications Limited (UK), ZDNet and Ziff Davis Media. THEY ALL HAVE ONE EQUAL VOTE.
I propose that the AMD Nigel Dessau speaks with his Bapco representative and start getting his feed back to the group.
Everybody has one vote, in the list I just gave ... very democratic process. If you have good idea, they will be heard.
Let's be constructive!
With CELL Phone advertised 24 hr. battery means about 6 minutes of operation, in some circumstances. Its' Designed into it, so it won't change. On SSD, it turns out power control turns OFF High Speed of SSD & Runs at less than half speed. So what'd good is all hard work for power conservation. Solution: Same as Prophet Mike Magee reported in Aug 2007 with Pictures of Dunnington Mainframe cpu card & then next step starting up with SSD on cpu slot, No Memory & NO Other Storage devices. Pure 1960s' Mainframe,
W/ Lots More Trannies. TS Stuff. Will that migrate to Notebook? Could be Final Solution. You'll need ALSO new Software & Hardware to get in on ~2014 event, yet with MATRIX O/S Shuffle, Your DeskTop/Workstation may be more powerful than bomb that blew hiroshima. TS Drashek
and what exactly your 20hr battery means ? :)
intel or amd. who cares. its all about the battery...i can buy a intel laptop from hp and add a 20hour hp battery to it.
Things like this need open discussion, not smoke-filled rooms with old men. That sounds too "Enron-ish" or "Madoff-ish".
Found a video interview of AMD on the subject over at http://www.notebooks.com/videos/.
It is simple to measure minimum and maximum battery life.
It is similar to mobile phones data.
They always publish standby and talk time.
Recently they started to publish music playback time and in soon they'll publish video playback time.
As for movies, it is harder since there is hardware assisted decoding for some codecs. not all notebook have all of them supported.
You have to decide which codecs do benchmark.
And i'm sure they (Intel) will try to hide battery life data even harder when ARM based netbooks arrive :)
If you have access to your desktop system or a powerpoint, then benchmarking battery life is moot.
As soon as you benchmark a net/notebook on battery life, then you need to do it in a 'real world usage scenario'.
Sure, have numbers for Photoshop etc - but that is not 'real' to many people.
What is real is to be stuck in an airport/station/office, with a 3-bar wireless signal, multiple browsers open (with at least one insisting on playing Flash-based advertising at you), while Outlook synchronises and you type up emails yourself.
For a laugh, throw in an open spreadsheet (but not being used as anything more complicated than a calculator where you can see your input errors :~)).
Lastly, have a limited anti-virus check kick off in the background (cos they seem to have embedded AI to 'know when you battery is low' - and use that as a trigger to kick off a run... maybe not a complete check - system files only).
Scenario 2 is to be watching something on DVD (who really uses Blu-Ray ?). Let's stay with the 'real world' aspect of the test and see how many episodes of West Wing, 24 or Heroes you can get through from 'full charge to system shut down'. That result will tell you how far you can fly on a plane before having to resort to the onboard 'entertainment'. People aren't idiots or bats - so let's agree to have the screen brightness set around 50-60% (but we'd need to standardise luminosity - to avoid cheating !).
Overall, if you gave me these 2 numbers - along with the weight of a device - then all I'd need is a quick feel of the keyboard to be certain I have made the right buying choice.
Come on Knuppfer/McNaughton - let's agree some intelligent mobile benchmarking cabers and give em a good toss :~)
Tis the energizer bunny that keeps going and going! Yay, rabbits!