Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ivany 4951 days ago
Intel chipsets and processors have gotten very, very good with power management. With reasonable screen brightness and Wifi enabled, my X220 idles at ~8.5W. With a 90Wh battery this gives me ~10 hours on a plane, which is more than I can handle in one go. A tablet TDP (iPad) is about 5W which is 2x better. This is 2X better for a device with smaller screen, no spinning drive, no keyboard, and a much weaker processor.

Intel has been improving their power efficiency dramatically in the past few years. They have the most advanced fabs and arguably the best technology in the semiconductor industry. All the talk is about ARM and low-power computing but Intel is, watt for watt, a serious threat in the high-performance computing market.
3 comments
mtgx 4951 days ago
That's a 6x larger battery, and it most likely scores only 3x faster in browser tests (this dual core A15 can score under 700 ms in Sunspider). And that's disregarding the much lower price and weight of this machine.
link
tluyben2 4951 days ago
X2xx seem to be nice laptops; i'm afraid to buy one though because I had quite bad experience with intel laptops including my 2009 and 2010 macbook pro's; they just conk out after 3 hours with new batteries. And I check often to see what is running and work almost only in the terminal (must say, since i replaced the native terminal of mac os x with iterm3 http://www.iterm2.com/ it is much better). The other intel laptops I had didn't even (ever) make that (even the ones with tiny screens). And I don't buy the cheapest stuff.

On the other hand; my S2, iPad 1, Pandora and Zaurus easily make 10 hours. I don't spare them from hard work but they do much better. On the Pandora & Zaurus I can work normally mostly (despite the tiny screens), so I don't mind a 10 inch screen (but preferably with an insane high res like the Nexus 10) at all.

link
rektide 4951 days ago
Recap: X220 idling: 8.5W. iPad's max 5W.

Agreed about one thing, Intel is finally starting to care about power efficiency. The CPUs have been solid since the Pentium M days, but the chipsets feel more neglected.

link