Intel's Napa Could Boost Laptop Battery Life
Intel yesterday unveiled further details on its next-generation Centrino platform, currently called Napa, including information on how it plans to improve laptop battery life. The chip manufacturer told attendees at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that it's working with other hardware manufactures to reduce power consumption in several key laptop components. The current industry goal is extending battery life to 8 hours, enough for a full workday. With the new Napa platform and improvements in LCD and battery technology, Intel hopes to get there by 2008.
There are no hidden miracles coming in battery technology. There's a buzz about fuel cells, but "not yet," said Martin Reynolds, a vice president and research fellow at Gartner. Mass production of fuel cells is still in the distant future. For now, good engineering is what's going to bring battery life in laptop PCs closer to the 8–hour goal. "How do we get there?" Reynolds asked. The answer seems to be 100 milliwatts at a time.
Battery capacity continues to increase slowly, but that alone is not going to bring life up to 8 hours. The rest of the platform will have to run on less power: The LCD, chipset, wireless LAN, and even software all need to reduce their electricity consumption.
LCDs, especially their backlights, still use the most power. One of the companies participating in IDF, the Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co., discussed LTPS (low-temperature polysilicon) as one way to save power in LCDs. This technology increases transmittance (the proportion of light that can pass through the layers of an LCD), which makes the screen look brighter, while using less power.
Software also plays a big part in power consumption. First, the BIOS needs to set the system's CPU and chipset power management correctly. Next, drivers need to be power-conscious and should put their devices in a low-power state as often as possible. They should also know enough to not interfere with the CPU's low-power states. And if applications help minimize CPU clock cycles, they can play a key role in allowing the CPU to get to a lower-power wait state as soon as possible.
Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1772287,00.asp
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