Posted on Monday, June 22 2009 @ 16:13 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Chip maker AMD is urging the industry to come up with a new way to define the battery life of a notebook, because the current test is totally unrealistic. One of the prime reasons why AMD is complaining is because it feels the MobileMark 2007 test gives Intel an unfair advantage, since AMD chips draw more power when idle:
AMD is recommending computer makers adopt a new way of measuring battery life, using two states: "active time" and "resting time," similar to the way cell-phone makers describe the "talk time" and "standby time" of a phone. A Dell executive says that approach makes sense, and that the company is considering providing customers with information beyond the MM07 scores. "Customers expect the advertised battery life to reflect the way they really use the product," says Ketan Pandya, head of AMD-based products at Dell.
AMD isn't leading this crusade out of a sense of altruism. Its real gripe is that MM07 gives Intel, its archrival, an unfair advantage. AMD claims MM07 was created in Intel's labs and rigged so that Intel chips would outscore AMD chips, since AMD chips draw more power when idle. (AMD says that in real-life usage, laptops using its chips perform comparably to Intel's.) AMD also points out that the president of BAPCo happens to be the head of performance benchmarking at Intel.
Read more
at NewsWeek.
