AMD admits industry "not entirely honest" about battery life

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 16 Mar 2009 at 10:33

A senior AMD executive has admitted the industry "is not being entirely honest about battery life" and has put forward a plan to rectify it.

In a blog posting, AMD's chief marketing officer Nigel Dessau has proposed a solution to the fact that battery life figures quoted by manufacturers for laptops invariably have nothing to do with reality.

In a stroke of honesty he admits that companies, such as AMD, derive battery performance figures from a single piece of benchmarking software called MobileMark 2007.

This is designed to run through a handful of common software programs without ever really testing the laptop. Indeed, in most cases these programs are run without the Wi-Fi switched on.

On average, Dessau claims that MobileMark only ever requires about 5% of a PC's resources, producing wildly disproportionate figures when it comes to battery life estimates.

His solution is to follow the template laid out by the car and phone companies and offer battery information based on activity: "Typically you only get one number and most people have no idea what that number really means in terms of how they will actually use the device: does this number represent the PC's battery life with the machine in use, or sitting idle?" Dessau writes.

"Not that the MM07 benchmark isn't useful; it's just that it only tells part of the story. It's just one guard-rail - shouldn't there be another?

"We propose that the industry needs another test to measure battery life, and we would like to propose adoption of the industry-standard 3DMark06 benchmark. The reason I like the sound of 3DMark06 is that it uses more graphics, it runs on Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista, and, most importantly, it runs the machine at a higher overall system utilisation than other industry-standard benchmarks."

Dessau reckons this would tax a system to around 50% of its capability, allowing companies to quote two figures for battery life - a light use and taxed.

As ever this could just be seen as another shot across Intel's bow, though Dessau says he's open to other suggestions: "If there's a better one, I'd like to hear about it," he says. "We're trying to engage the community in a conversation."

Intel though, isn't buying it: "There are many ways to measure battery life," a spokeswoman says. "We believe the best way to determine how to measure battery life is by making proposals and debating it in industry consortium and not via blog post."