[mortenlarsen]

What about the internal resistance of the battery? Doesn't that increase with higher current?

As in 1A for 2 seconds uses less actual battery power than 2A for 1 second due to internal loss in the battery?

I may be remembering this wrong, It has been a long time since I studied this stuff.

[hinkley]

That’s true when you’ve saturated all of those subsystems but not when you’re just CPU bound. If you’re doing high throughput from disk to memory to CPU and back to disk, there are levels of use where throttling IO helps with battery draw. There are old papers on the subject, and I have a suspicion that OS X started doing something of the sort when they went to nonremovable batteries in the MacBook. There’s a 30% reduction in power draw in that generation that they brag about but don’t really explain, and it was a handful of years after that first paper showed up.