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AMD tackles thorny problem of laptop battery life
AMD will improve its chips' power consumption over the next 6 years, hoping for idle battery life in laptops of up to 50 hours

Advanced Micro Devices is reworking its core PC chip design to be 25 times more energy-efficient over the next six years, possibly resulting in laptop battery life of up to 50 hours on idle time.

So said Sam Naffziger, corporate fellow at AMD, adding that estimated battery life on active use would also be significantly better, although he couldn't quantify that expected improvement.

AMD is trying to sharpen performance-per-watt, with an equal emphasis on power efficiency and performance enhancements. Technological advances like reductions in chip size, restructuring of transistors, new memory technologies, solid-state drives and software improvements will also help AMD in meeting its goals.

In the past six years, AMD has delivered a 10-times improvement in performance-per-watt through its chips. But the company is now taking a fine-grained look at circuitry so inactive parts can be shut down at the microsecond level when not in use.

AMD will achieve the energy-efficient improvements on both its x86 and ARM architecture chips, Naffziger said. The ARM processors, used in most smartphones and tablets, are considered more power-efficient than the x86 chips.

AMD's performance-per-watt improvement estimates over the next six years are based on the joint performance of CPUs and GPUs, which the company integrates on one chip. But much of the overall performance improvement recently has been driven by the GPU.

Manufacturing challenges have also made chips harder to reduce in size, so software and hardware modifications are key to bring more battery life to laptops. "Moore's Law isn't doing us any favors in power efficiency anymore," Naffziger said.

Edasi juba lingil:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/laptop/3526335/amd-tackles-thorny-problem-of-laptop-battery-life/