Doubling Laptop Battery Life  

Technology review reports that Intel's new integrated power management could dramatically reduce power consumption in laptops - Doubling Laptop Battery Life.

Anyone who uses a laptop on an airplane would love a single battery to last through a trans-American flight. Now researchers at Intel believe that they can double a laptop's battery life without changing the battery itself. Instead, they would optimize power management--system wide--of the operating system, screen, mouse, chips inside the motherboard, and devices attached to USB ports.

To be sure, manufacturers and researchers have been exploring piecemeal ways to make portable computers more energy efficient. Operating systems are designed to deploy power-saving screen savers and put an entire system to sleep if its owner hasn't used it after a while. And Intel's forthcoming Atom, a microprocessor for mobile Internet devices, can be put to sleep at up to six different levels, depending on the types of tasks that it needs to do.

But the problem with these approaches is that they're not coordinated across the entire device. Intel's prototype power-management system is aware of the power that's used by all parts of a laptop, as well as the power requirements of a person's activity, and it shuts down operations accordingly, says Greg Allison, business development manager. The project, called advanced platform power management, was demonstrated on Wednesday at an Intel event in Mountain View, CA.