Intel Working to Double Battery Life

[unxmully]

... I want to take my T3 off it's cradle today, use it for three hours per day and get the low battery warning just after Christmas.

What's that, about 600 hours of usage. Only needs to go up by a factor of 150 or so. Sounds OK to me

Oh, and I want that with wireless so I can synch with my home workstation without needing to be physically connected to it.

Mind you if you could double the battery capacity and halve the power consumption of the components, 16 hours would be a big step forward.

Question, I'm sure I read a while back that the newer battery technologies could be "shaped" more than the old. If that is the case, does anyone know why the whole chassis of a PDA or laptop isn't just one big battery :?:

[unxmully]

... I want to take my T3 off it's cradle today, use it for three hours per day and get the low battery warning just after Christmas.

What's that, about 600 hours of usage. Only needs to go up by a factor of 150 or so. Sounds OK to me

Oh, and I want that with wireless so I can synch with my home workstation without needing to be physically connected to it.

Mind you if you could double the battery capacity and halve the power consumption of the components, 16 hours would be a big step forward.

Question, I'm sure I read a while back that the newer battery technologies could be "shaped" more than the old. If that is the case, does anyone know why the whole chassis of a PDA or laptop isn't just one big battery :?:

[Jonathon Watkins]

Originally Posted by huangzhinong

It won't happen. It's about the difference between physics and chemistry. Moore's law only apply to physics engineering. Battary belongs to chemical engineering.

I am fully aware of this and was pointing out that we need similar battery life increases to keep up with the increases in processor speeds etc.

[Felix Torres]

Originally Posted by kosmicki

Laptop computer life is already shi**y, I want to see one of those 1lb notebooks, with a 2lb battery. 24 hours AT LEAST per charge.

Remember, just IMNSHO.

This you can have today.
If you can afford the 1 lb notebook (cheap they ain't) then you can afford the $400 for an Electrovaya powerpad that gives you 16-24 hours of *extra* battery life.
Very thin and nicely implemented.
A friend of mine got one at work...

Electrovaya's TabletPCs all come with this kind of battery so, again, if you can afford it, you *can* get a fast computer with an all-day battery.
There's a review posted around here somewhere...

[hotweiss]

This is a nice improvement in battery technology, but lithium sulphur batteries promise a lot more power.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/12/lithium_sulfur
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C2838/

Although it looks like the zinc batteries will make it to the market first.

[omikron.sk]

Does 10AH on the picture really mean Amper-hours ? 10 AH = 10 000 mAh, right?
:jawdrop:

[torok]

Well, I'm impressed. I don't think I've ever seen battery energy density double. If they can pull it off, of course.

[torok]

Originally Posted by omikron.sk

Does 10AH on the picture really mean Amper-hours ? 10 AH = 10 000 mAh, right?
:jawdrop:

Maybe that cell is the size of house cat.

[Talon]

Or you could just use a lower power PDA :-)

Where does the power go?
The CPU, the memory, the display and wireless stuff.

Intel ARM based parts have always used more power that other manufacturers ARM parts.
Yes an Xscale is clocked faster than other ARM9 cores so if you ran it at the same speed the power would be around the same. But the Xscale is not a true ARM, it gets a lower throughput per clock than any other ARM9. Plus it's the idle power that matters anyway, the CPU is idle most of the time on a PDA. Things like the OMAP are an order of magnitude lower power when idle than the xscale.

The memory, well if you use the new lower power mobile SDRAM then the power is a lot lower but it costs a lot more. The last PDA I took apart was still using standard SDRAM but that was a while ago.
Plus if you halve the RAM you halve the power it takes. Not a big deal when the system is busy but a big factor on the standby life of the battery. With demand pageing now in PPC you can use NAND flash and only use up around 2MB more ram than if you were running from NOR flash. Expect to see more people using that.

As for displays, the backlight is the biggest power user on the whole system. But people want bright backlights. Not much chance of that changing much.
One thing that will change, the higher the resolution the display the darker it will be. Which means higher resolution displays need more power in the backlight to appear the same brightness. There is no getting away from that, it will be canceled out a bit by better display technology but not completely.

Finally wireless. Idle it doesn't take much power. As soon as you start using it you can expect to see the battery percentage fall. Bluetooth is bad, 802.11x is worse. There isn't a lot you can do about it and while the power used will go down with new generations it is never going to be low power.

[Jonathon Watkins]

Originally Posted by omikron.sk

Does 10AH on the picture really mean Amper-hours ? 10 AH = 10 000 mAh, right?

Hmmm, that looks too good to be true..........

[Talon]

Originally Posted by Jonathon Watkins

Hmmm, that looks too good to be true..........

It does mean that but it is too good to be true.
That cell is 1.6V, most Li-Ion cells have a nominal voltage of 3.7V.
So a 10Ah 1.6V cell contains 16Wh of power, the same as a 4.3Ah (or 4324mAh) Li-Ion cell.